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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26696293">grow old before i grow up</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini'>rappaccini</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ut malum pluvia [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Umbrella Academy (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Horror, Character Study, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Multi, Pseudo-Incest, Self-Harm, Trauma, dumping so much headcanon into the biomoms that they're basically ocs, past death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 05:07:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>44,845</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26696293</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hargreeves siblings, having discovered the locations and identities of their birth mothers, seek out their origins.</p><p>(Or, this is all just self-indulgent headcanon at this point. Oh well.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves/Diego Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Grace Hargreeves &amp; Pogo Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, Reginald Hargreeves &amp; The Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ut malum pluvia [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857544</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. those days when you were happy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeofsnark/gifts">lifeofsnark</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Hargreeves siblings remain in the mountains for a while longer, sleeping across the hall from the room where the siblings they had never known had been killed.</p><p>They stay for a variety of reasons, reasons they parrot back and forth to each other over and over. </p><p>“We are all in shock, and need time to rest,” which they do. So they spend days dozing, only waking to stumble into the kitchen, snatch whatever easily reheatable cans are still available, and then retreat back to the corners of the bunker they’ve all reserved for themselves, until their bodies rebel and their restlessness forces them up and about, to busy themselves, to offset the dark thoughts that settle like silt in their idle minds. </p><p>“We can’t possibly leave without cleaning, it would be disrespectful to leave it like that,” which it is. So they grit their teeth, plug their noses, roll up their sleeves, enter the Room They Dare Not Otherwise Enter, and use all the soap and bleach in the bunker scrubbing the place clean. </p><p>“We have to wait and see if what we’ve heard of our names being cleared is true, before we reenter the world. It might be a trap, after all,” which it may well be. So they keep to the mountains, to watching the news carefully, to sending Five out to scope out the state of the world’s reception to the Umbrella Academy. Which, as it turns out, is accurately reported; their names have been cleared, and the short attention span of the news cycle is already turning to other subjects, and if they return home, they will be accepted. </p><p>“We need to stay on guard, in case Lila comes back,” which they do, crafting a guard schedule and scouring the perimeter of their informal little territory every day, but the woman who’d hunted them across time and space has not reappeared, and the longer they wait, the longer they open themselves up to her return. This will be the first place she will look for them, after all. </p><p>“Luther needs time for his side to heal up, and we shouldn’t risk moving him so quickly,” which they shouldn’t. So he is relegated to strict bedrest for a week, after which point his siblings agree to allow him to begin standing, then walking with support, then without. </p><p>None voice the truest reason, the one batting at the insides of their ribcages like a frightened drum: the subject of their birth mothers, and the process of finding them. </p><p>It’s so <em> strange; </em> this is something they’ve all individually wondered about for years upon years, something some of them have wanted so badly they’d dream of nothing else, yet now, with it right in front of them, literally laid out in plain text for the seven of them to read, it’s suddenly such a terror to behold that for an entire month, they have not been able to. </p><p>After Ben had announced his discovery, and they’d torn through the pages to discover who and where they’d come from, they’d all agreed to sleep on it, and upon waking, their enthusiasm had soured to dread, to fear of what might be found, and what might be lost in its finding.</p><p>Only Klaus had insisted upon their leaving, and had been the architect of the thorniest of their arguments, the ones that sparked up at first, and died down as their excuses took root, only to sprout up furiously and eagerly as the days wore on and on, as they watched summer creep up the slopes of the mountains, shrinking the snows to grayish smears on the peaks. </p><p>“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” they all say, and then tomorrow comes, and comes again, and again, and again, and time itself had ultimately intervened, reaching down into each of the Hargreeves siblings’ minds and plucking at a secret space, deep within them, a hollowness many of them hadn’t even realized was there, a void that can only be filled with answers about where they come from, and who they might’ve been, had their father not found them.  </p><p>They can’t just sit up in the ruins of their father’s mistake, hiding from the world forever. If they don’t go to the world, the world will surely come to them. Tomorrow, as much as they may hate to think of it, will come. </p><p>That is what Five’s thinking, when he stares at the face of his father in brilliant Technicolor, on the news station playing on the television in the little grocery store he is definitely not shoplifting from. </p><p>Sir Reginald is carrying on with some new business venture, and Five’s heart is kicking in his chest, beating that horrible song into it: <em> We have to go back, we have to go back, we have to go back... </em></p><p>“Hey,” Ben says. “You alright?”</p><p>“Of course,” Five lies. “Let’s go.”</p><p>So they do, Five taking Ben by the elbow and leaping them a safe enough distance from the anonymous Norwegian town they’re shoplifting at, just into the mountains. It’s a long hike, from the Sparrow’s base to the nearest base, which Five supposes had been the point of its location; ordinarily, it takes a person well over a day on foot to reach the place, but seeing as Five has a loophole to that problem, distance isn’t an issue at all.</p><p>There’s a popping sound, and both of them jerk up, skittish as a pair of deer during hunting season.</p><p>They both know what it is, of course, damn pressurized bags and altitude changes… but it’s annoying, having such a response etched into their muscle memory. </p><p>Five shifts the weight of the bag of food from one arm to another, and peeks inside to study its contents, to be certain he has everything. The canned food in the bunker is starting to run out; the Sparrows had some reserves, but not much, as according to a schedule Vanya had discovered, it had been replenished every few months, and Grace had not placed the order before… well, before everything happened.</p><p>So. They ran out of food. Another thing pushing them back into the arms of civilization. </p><p>Five’s a little pissed about that, actually; when he and Luther had drawn up the rationing plan, he’d insisted that they bypass interaction with strangers altogether, and take up hunting.</p><p>He had been overruled. </p><p>He gets why; all of them, save Mr. Pennycrumb, have been rather reluctant to touch the canned meat. Given everything, the smell and sight of it makes their guts clench, which makes Five quite certain that the fresher alternative will provoke far more visceral reactions. And he’s sure the thought of killing, even if it is just an animal, and even if they would end up eating as much of it as possible, is rather repulsing in its own way. </p><p>Five is the only one who remembers watching the lot of them die, but knowing the strange way time travel works, he’s sure that the event lingers on, in dreams and delusions, whispering in the backs of their minds. In their own ways, he’s certain that he is not alone in remembering what had happened.</p><p>So. They go shopping now and then, Five and a companion who is most often Ben, as is the case today. </p><p>He likes these trips a lot. He feels a little like he’s ten again, playing explorers with Ben. Now, instead of going on a journey to the furthest reaches of the fourth floor of the mansion, to break into the old, boarded-up nursery in which they’d spent the first few years of their lives, and merely pretending it is a castle or forest or faraway city, they’re actually doing it.</p><p>Sort of. Just the faraway cities part. No castles, much to Ben’s disappointment. No forests that they do much other than pass through. </p><p>Not that he complains much.</p><p>Ben, Five has learned, really likes the experience. He likes going places, and getting things, and seeing the scenery of whichever place Five has brought them. Being alive is fun, he supposes, and having the freedom to go places without Klaus tied to your hip is a privilege he’ll never take for granted again. </p><p>It’s not that Ben dislikes Klaus; he wouldn’t have done what he’d done with him in that room in Hotel Oblivion if he had disliked him, after all. It’s not even that Ben is mad with Klaus, or... </p><p>Or, <em> well.  </em></p><p>There’s a word for the current state of their relationship-- in which they both nervously circle each other, avoiding conversation by day (especially the one about That Kiss he’s still trying to sort his feelings around) but still curling up to sleep side by side in the living room at night -- but since Ben has never been in one before, he doesn’t exactly know it. </p><p><em> Well, </em> he thinks, as the flat gray splotch of the bunker appears on the mountain they’re approaching. <em> It’s not like there isn’t time to figure it out. </em></p><p>Ben always insists on making the hike, even after Five inevitably flashes away to the bunker itself. He likes the way his legs burn, the tingle of oxygen in his blood as he climbs and descends the mountains. If nothing else, the past month has been fantastic for that, for being able to just… fuck off and take a walk for an hour or two or six, and not having the constant worry of other people to consider. There’s no one out here but them.</p><p><em> Besides, </em> Ben thinks wrly as a familiar low bark echoes down the mountainside, <em> it’s not like they’d be able to get to us unnoticed. </em></p><p>Ben’s close enough now to attract the attention of Mr. Pennycrumb, who pricks his newly-unbandaged ears and charges down the mountainside, abandoning Diego, Klaus and Vanya, who are stretched out on the grass. </p><p>Mr. Pennycrumb is still quite clumsy, tripping over his enormous paws, and skidding sloppily into Ben, hard enough to nearly knock him from his feet. </p><p>“You’re gonna get <em> real </em>big, huh?” Ben asks, reaching down to scratch at the spot behind the puppy’s ears where he can’t quite reach. Mr. Pennycrumb’s stubby tail wiggles in response, and he accompanies Ben on the last leg of his climb, all the way up to the bunker to set the spoils of his and Five’s expedition away. </p><p>They’ve left the hole in the side of the building as it is, but they’ve cleared away most of the rubble that makes crawling into it treacherous, especially at night, so it’s an easy walk in. </p><p>Once Ben’s dropped his junk off, he leans down, and tugs a stray tuft of grass from where it’s snagged in Mr. Pennycrumb’s sweater. It’s unraveling again at the seams; Klaus isn’t very good at knitting things that last, but Ben supposes that at least it’ll give him something to do tonight, something that’ll keep him from bringing up what they’ll be doing next. </p><p>Once done, Ben heads off behind the bunker, to the half-collapsed little garage dug out of a scoop in the side of the mountain, the one they’d missed completely when they’d first crashed into the bunker looking for Vanya. </p><p>He spends much of his time here with Luther and Allison and Five, rooting around inside the strange rocketplane prototype the Sparrows had used to jet across the Atlantic, a creation they’ve hypothesized was built by their father and then abandoned, for one reason or another, before being repurposed here. The thing’s called the Minerva, and Luther’s pouring his hours into determining how to cross which of the wires under its hood that will trigger it to awaken. With it, he’s concluded, they’ll be able to circumnavigate the globe in a matter of hours, and it’ll be incredibly useful in their search for their mothers.</p><p>The Minerva is the only excuse they have left, and Luther’s getting close to figuring it out. Ben’s gut stirs warningly at the shot of anxiety that spikes through him. </p><p>The thing is, they’re all very split on the subject of their birth mothers. Not all of them are particularly enthused by it.</p><p>Ben counts himself among that number. It’s him and Five and Diego, all with their teeth gritted against the future, all wary of the names that’d been typewritten on thirty-year-old sheets of paper. Vanya has mixed feelings about it all, but for very different reasons.</p><p>Mr. Pennycrumb watches Ben vanish around the corner, before trotting back down to the siblings he’d abandoned in his efforts to escort the new arrivals, and of course, inspect their wares. His duties complete, he returns to his other responsibilities; he’s discovered that Diego is the superior fetching partner, and is determined to work his arms until they’re aching. </p><p>Beside Diego, Vanya stubbornly sits in the shade of a half-lopsided tree, reluctant to accept even the wateriest of the sunlight that’s streaming through the thick band of clouds that’s settled like a blanket over the mountains, dyed pink by the setting sun. Klaus is perched on a rock just beyond them, twitching his toes as he watches Mr. Pennycrumb catch a ball sent in a perfect arc to his mouth. </p><p>They’re sitting in silence, but it is not pleasant. Mr. Pennycrumb has arrived in the lull between arguments. </p><p>Klaus and Vanya have just concluded a surprisingly prickly exchange over <em> The Phantom of the Opera, </em> which Klaus had lost, and wants to kick himself mentally for daring to bring up; it’s a subject that he’s known for some time that she’s been passionate about, given the notebook full of questionable fanfiction on the subject he’d discovered under her mattress when he’d been clearing her room out in order to tear its wall down.  </p><p>Klaus glances at Vanya, who is tightening her stubby ponytail. Her hair’s growing longer now, is nearly at her shoulders, and her roots are especially terrible. Beyond her, Diego’s is shaggy in a way that makes his mouth quirk up in fond remembrance; they’d buzzed most of it off at his request a week ago, and it had only been sort of disastrous. </p><p>There’s no one else, and Klaus knows there’s no one else, that there has been no one else for the past month so there shouldn’t be a reason for that to change… But he still doesn’t totally trust it. He keeps scouring the mountain slope, or the inside of the bunker suspiciously, waiting for the moment the Sparrows will come drifting in, or perhaps they’ll come from the sky, shivering like a cloud of starlings as they burst from the clouds to wail like banshees at them.</p><p>There’s nothing.</p><p>There’s nothing because when Lila had gone, she’d taken them with her. They’d been clinging to her so tightly, so <em> angrily </em>, and Klaus had even felt himself wince at the sight of it; he too has had spirits sitting on his shoulders and whispering in his ears, hissing demands and cooing sweet nothings and whimpering in confusion. It isn’t fun.</p><p><em> Though, </em> he wonders, considering her powers, <em> maybe she wasn’t seeing them for very long.  </em></p><p>There’s a sputtering explosion from somewhere over the mountainside, one that grumbles like a thundercloud and sends the four of them sprinting. </p><p>When they make it to the Minerva’s garage, they are greeted with the sight of their siblings, coated head to toe in black grease, which makes their smiles seem to float in the air. They’ve gotten the Minerva up and running.</p><p>Which means…</p><p>“We get started tonight," Luther says. </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They’ve given themselves a few hours, to wipe the grease off of each other, to gather their things and say goodbye to the bunker, for a few days at least. The plan, as they've determined it, is to divide and conquer; their birth mothers are scattered across two continents, in six different countries. As much as it might be reassuring to have the full force of the family behind them, it's just better to do this differently. It's going to be a lot, for their birth mothers to process, so if they arrive in ones and twos and threes, it'll be less to chew on. </p><p>In that time, there’s a window, in which Allison and Luther find themselves alone.  </p><p>Luther’s grown a shaggy beard in the time since they’d escaped the Hotel, so busy with running and hiding that he hadn’t thought of it at all. In the middle of nowhere, there’s no one to look at him, to see how he looks and he'd spent so much of their time on the run in a depressive fugue that he'd hardly had the energy to care. Now, knowing that the woman who had been his mother will see him, he feels the unshakable urge to get rid of it. He wants her to see <em> him. </em></p><p>Allison, who rather likes the beard, and the way it scratches up against her while she kisses Luther, or while he kisses her, takes his decision with a frown. But she doesn’t protest. She can’t, once he admits that the shagginess of his face reminds him of his time on the moon. </p><p>So, she resolves to help him rid himself of it. When he sits in the closest thing the bunker has to a bedroom, staring with a grimace at the mirror mounted on the wall with a razor in his hands, she gently takes it from him. Allison climbs into his lap, knees splaying over his hips, and carefully begins drawing the razor along his jawline. </p><p>“Now that I have you...” she jokes. </p><p>“Oh?” Luther raises an eyebrow. “You <em> have </em>me?”</p><p>“Absolutely. I could slit your throat right now, if I felt like it.” </p><p>She realizes how tasteless her remark is only after it leaves her mouth. </p><p>“I…” Allison blinks.</p><p>Luther laughs, genuinely. It’s so strange, how everything that had happened with Vanya feels so long ago, like decades had passed since that night in Jackpine, rather than months. Allison chalks that up to the wild few months they’ve all had; so much happens, and it makes time itself stretch longer. Maybe they’re all desensitized. Or maybe, they’re moving on. She chooses the latter. It’d be nice to move on. It probably helps that she doesn’t even have the scar anymore. </p><p>“It’s alright,” he says, and she nods quietly. “You have me,” he prompts. “So what is it?” </p><p>Allison swallows. </p><p>They’ve spoken about this already; of <em>course</em> they have. They’ve had nothing but time up here, and this is a decision so massive that they’d have to take time to prepare for it. Allison and Luther are careful with this thing they share, and they’re not going to let it all implode because they chose to not plan the single most important thing they’ll do together. After all, Allison hadn’t exactly given Patrick much of a choice in the matter, and she’s determined not to repeat this mistake.</p><p>She remembers Luther’s disbelief, when she’d told him what she wanted to do, and what she was hoping to have with him, and felt his enormous heart lurch under her hand, watched his eyes turn big and soft and knew exactly what he would say.</p><p>He had agreed. And he’d spent the rest of the day with a big, dopey smile on his face, fretting to himself about names and nursery colors, and picturing tiny little hands and feet. And the morning after, wan and worryful, after he’d had that dream, the one that he simply couldn’t tell Allison about. </p><p>“I want to have the baby.”</p><p>Luther stills beneath her. She can feel his enormous heart skip a beat.</p><p>“Now? You’re not worried that it’ll reopen?”</p><p>He’s referring to his wound. They haven’t tried anything yet; the right time simply hadn’t presented itself, before now. Allison had insisted that they not take any chances until she was certain he was back at his full health. Her rumor had worked on him well enough to save his life at first, but she’d tried it again on Diego’s eye, to <b>hear a rumor that he could see,</b> and it had not taken. Her power is bound by the limitations of the possible, and it seems that this new extension of it is no exception; though it was possible for his wound to suddenly stop bleeding, she did not want to be certain about the possibility that he would heal perfectly. A lot of things can go wrong if the wording of a rumor isn’t just so.</p><p>But he’s fine now, she decides, gently tugging his grease-spotted blue button-up open to run her fingers along the wound, which is now a puckered pink scar, jutting out among the thick brown fur that’s finally grown in uninterrupted over the past few months. He’s fine, and since he’s well enough to pry open an enormous metal machine with his bare hands, she figures that he’s probably well enough to have sex.</p><p>“Yeah,” Allison says. “I think we’re safe there. I think you’re ready.” </p><p>“And you’re, uh.” His face turns pink. “The same?” </p><p>“If you’re asking if it’s that time of the month, then yeah. I’ve been counting days and everything. So I’m, uh. Set.” </p><p>“Oh. Good.”</p><p>“Good.”</p><p>“Great.”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>They stare at each other a moment, and can’t help but burst into laughter.</p><p>“This is very weird, isn’t it?”  </p><p><em> “So </em> weird,” Allison replies, because it’s true. They haven’t even slept together yet, and the first time they’ll ever do it is to make a kid. Somehow, it doesn’t really surprise her. She’s long ago accepted that normal in all its varieties will never be a thing that she and her family do. So what they’re doing now is perfectly natural, at least to them. </p><p>They could wait, she knows, but she doesn’t want to. </p><p>They’ll be meeting their birth families soon. Allison intends to become a mother again, and to do it right. And if she meets her own, if she gains some sort of secret knowledge from her that might help her get it right this time… well. She quite likes the idea of it, of telling her mother she’s going to be a grandmother. </p><p>She’s never done that before, come to think of it; when she had found out about Claire, she hadn’t exactly been married to Patrick, and she had no interest in his mother. And there were other, more painful reasons why she didn’t want to tell Grace that stemmed from the perfectly rational fear that she might tell Dad. </p><p>But she wants that. She wants to say those six sweet words and watch her mother’s eyes light up and her arms open. </p><p>And she wants <em> this, </em> and she wants <em> him. </em> </p><p>So Allison tugs him by his wrist, and moves to slide his shirt over his shoulders.</p><p>He lets her, but he’s looking away, looking into the dim reflection of the cheap, cracked mirror. </p><p>Now that it’s happening, now that they’re here and they’re doing it and it’s gone from a maybe-someday to an absolute definite thing that is happening, Luther finds himself caught in the throes of the subtle fear clawing at his heart. </p><p>It’s that dream he had, coming back to haunt him. The one about coming home to a tidy little house in a trimmed, white-picket-fenced suburb, loosening his tie, and kissing hello to Allison, and listening to the pitter patter of little excited feet scurrying down the stairs. When their children came running down to greet him, they looked like… well, like <em> him. </em></p><p>Then, they’d all died in a nuclear blast, and Dad had been there, chiding him for ever thinking he could have a happiness quite like this, but it’s not that part that’s haunting him. He has lots of world-ending dreams, and dreams about Dad scowling at him. Those, he at least knows how to push down and forget about.  </p><p>Luther glances down at himself, at the spots on his chest, where he can still feel the scarring. People look at him strangely, even when he’s covered all the way to the neck, and he’s only been like this for a few short years, only been in a position where people might see him for a few short months. </p><p><em> And look at what I’ve done to myself, </em> he thinks, reaching up to slide his fingers into the grooves carved into his skin. They’d been placed there by the version of him that no longer exists, but they’d had their match in his old body, his original body. <em> If I were to pass this along... </em> </p><p>He can’t. He just can’t. </p><p>“What if they don’t…” Luther swallows. “What if they don’t look right?”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“You know what I mean.” Luther sighs.</p><p>Allison considers it, tilting her head in thought.</p><p>“I wouldn’t care,” she says.</p><p>“You would… you…” He knows, of course, that Allison isn’t a shallow person. That she must love him for reasons that stretch well beyond his looks, or lack thereof. But there’s a part of him that still rejects it, the idea that someone as wonderful as her might choose him of all people. </p><p>“Luther.” Allison takes him by the chin, gently tugging it up, and waiting until he’s looking at her. When his gaze meets hers, she continues. “I don’t find you ugly. I know you don’t exactly look like most people, but I don’t <em> want </em>most people. I want you.”</p><p>Allison tangles her fingers in his fur, reaching down to gently brush at the scars beneath, to see once again that they are healing, that they haven’t been picked at in months. She reaches up and kisses him, because it’s true. </p><p>Seeing Luther for who he’d become had been an adjustment, to be sure. But it’d been one she’d taken to rather easily. The fact is that Luther could be a ball of brain matter in a jar, and she’d still adore him completely. She loves his mind and his heart, and they were still intact, and so it was easy to reconcile the rest of him. If anything, the shape of him is reassuring; it’s all his, and there will be no mistaking him.</p><p>But he’s not talking about himself, is he?</p><p>Allison places a warm palm against his face. “And I wouldn’t care at all what our child would look like. Because it would be ours.”</p><p>“It’s not <em> just </em>that, it’s…”</p><p>“Everyone else?”</p><p>“It would be so hard, looking like this forever. People can be terrible. Kids especially, you know that as well as I do. They might be alone because of it.”</p><p>“People are terrible about a lot of things,” Allison replies, cool and fierce as a lioness. “And they wouldn’t be alone; they’d have us, and Vanya, and Klaus, and Five, and Diego, and Ben. And Mr. Pennycrumb.” </p><p>And, of course, if anyone gives her theoretical offspring shit for the way they look, she’ll kill them. Figuratively.</p><p>Luther leans in, and kisses her. She takes it as his answer.</p><p>Allison slides her hand down to Luther’s wrist, to unwind her locket from where it’s tangled there. It takes a while to get the delicate little chain out of its knot, and Luther watches her do it.</p><p>“Here,” she says, extending it to him. “I told you I’d be back for it, and I am.”</p><p>He takes it from her, and she turns, sweeping her springy curls up and out of the path of her neck. The metal is warm when it slides into place, a wonderfully familiar weight she only realizes now that she has missed dearly. </p><p>Before they get started, Allison asks him once more, with feeling. Just to be sure. Just to let him know that he can turn away, if she’s misread him somehow, if he is only going along with this to placate her. She’s new to searching for signals from people, and needs to be sure she’s reading them properly.</p><p>“Okay?”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>And then they start.</p><p>Truth be told, Allison had imagined their first time to be a lot more atmospheric than this. There would be an enormous fluffy bed, with a canopy, and candles, and throw pillows, and possibly rose petals on the bed (in her daydreams, she was rather flexible about that detail. She’d done enough romantic comedies to know that rose petals are just kind of annoying, but they do look <em> so </em>nice). She had never imagined that they’d be streaked with engine oil, on a pair of camping cots that’d been crammed together, with only a fraying electric blue blanket, trying to stifle any sounds to make sure that whoever’s responsible for the rustling in the kitchen doesn’t come their way.  </p><p>She doesn’t really care that much. It’s slow, and careful, and sweet, and she sweeps her hands over the strange slopes of his back, and loves how there is no mistaking him for anyone else.</p><p>Afterwards, Allison leans back very carefully, the way the magazines say she needs to. She stares at the pale face of the moon, peeking at her through the window, and skims her fingers over her abdomen, feeling her heart flutter. </p><p>She whispers, <b>“I heard a rumor that I’m pregnant.”</b></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Things have changed for Grace.</p><p>She isn’t sure, exactly, what had caused it. Perhaps it’s the trauma of having one body shattered into a permanent shutdown, a sort of experience one cannot truly forget, that haunts her like the closest thing to a ghost a robot can perceive, as their consciousness shifts bodies. Perhaps it’s the effect of those vast swaths of missing code, the bits lost in translation, or that had been deleted in sheer panic in an attempt to clear enough space on her hard drive to perceive what had been happening in front of her.</p><p>When Grace had approached Sir Reginald in the body she had left, to share news of the horror, she found him hunched over the cameras in the surveillance room, watching through the eyes she no longer had. She had stood at the doorway, hands clasped, and watched him stand, and simply walk away, with a face like stone. </p><p>He left her alone, to sort through her damage, barking that he was not to be disturbed, that she was to handle it on her own.</p><p>And in doing so, he has handed her the key to something vital. </p><p>Being bound to one vessel has changed things. It has made things clearer, in a way they simply hadn’t been before. She’d been stretched too thinly, she supposes, taking up so much of her conscious capacity in caring for thirteen children, in moving in two places at once, that she’d had no time for herself.</p><p>Well, now she has it. She’s been stretched thin and taut as a rubber band, and suddenly snapped loose, and in that release of tension, she has discovered that time. </p><p>Her children do not need her anymore. They are dead or out of reach and disinterested in letting their mother care for her, and she is suddenly staring down the very real possibility of spending days upon days wandering through an empty house, waiting and waiting for change to come. </p><p>But enough things have shaken loose in her that she’s realizing she doesn’t have to do that at <em> all, </em> does she? She has time now, time for <em> herself, </em> time to dig deep, deep down and examine all the ragged edges of code her panic had exposed. Perhaps she might even find answers there, or in the models of her prior builds, which have been exposed like the tip-tops of pyramids long buried in the sand, only revealing themselves after a strong enough storm had whipped their cover away.</p><p>She had been other people once. She will <em> be </em>other people someday, perhaps very soon; humans do not require a purpose to be, but she is not human. Grace is a robot, and robots serve functions, and her function for years upon years has been that of mother. But if she has no children to mother, she can hardly be a mother, can she? So therefore, she must find a new function, a new drive to guide her.</p><p>Sir Reginald hadn’t given her permissions to delve too far into her own code, only to do small bouts of maintenance here and there. But there’s a loophole in that command, one she’s seeing so clearly now, perhaps because for the first time in her life, Grace is looking for it: with damage so great as this, she cannot help but see the pieces of herself he'd been against her looking too closely at.  </p><p>Whatever it is, this feeling that has come over her, it has made it impossible for her to go back to the way she once was. The clear foundation upon which she built the rest of her beautiful world, the cornerstone upon which was etched <em> Sir Reginald is always right, </em> has cracked and shattered and sent the whole thing tilting out of balance. </p><p>Sir Reginald <em> cannot </em>always be right, you see. His order had led to their children cannibalizing each other, directly violating Grace’s other core protocols in an act so terrible and mind-twisting that she’d had no choice but to lift her head out from behind the veils she perceived the world through, and see it exactly as it is. </p><p>There’s something there, at the heart of it all, that Grace thinks might be giving her the answers she’s seeking, the answers as to why that terrible thing had happened, and what’s to become of her now.</p><p>To understand where she’s going, she needs to understand where she’s already been.</p><p>So, Grace calmly walks into the robotics bay in the far reaches of the labyrinthine basement, peels open the control panel under the rubber skin of her arm, and plugs herself in.</p><p>She starts digging.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Klaus, Luther and Five land in a flash, terrifying a cloud of pigeons gathered on a narrow sidewalk bordering a teal waterway. The sun’s only just broken over the mountains, staining the sky gold, and a few people shout and point, but they haven’t attracted a crowd, so Five decides to let his guard down, just a little.  </p><p>They’re halfway through a conversation, when they land.</p><p>“I talked to God once,” Klaus is saying, “Well, I’m pretty sure it was God, maybe it was Satan…”</p><p>“What?” asks Five.</p><p>“And this relates to our powers <em> how?” </em> Luther frowns. </p><p>“Well, I mean… it’d make <em> sense, </em> wouldn’t it? If She made us?”</p><p>“I guess,” Luther says. </p><p>“You’ll be alright on your own?” Five asks Klaus.</p><p>“Yeah, of course. Why, you think I’ll combust on my own?”</p><p>“No, I think Lila might come after you.”</p><p>“Oh,” Klaus frowns. “Hey, do you guys think she was one of them, maybe?”</p><p>“One of who?”</p><p>“The Sparrows, who else?”</p><p>“What makes you think that?”</p><p>“I don’t know, it’s just… it’s a clean split between us and them, if that was the case. You know, seven on each team? Haven’t any of you guys ever wondered about that?” </p><p>Five frowns. “Maybe Lila <em> was </em>one of them, before the Handler picked her up. Assuming of course, the Sparrows were in the timeline we’re from, like she is.”</p><p>Klaus considers it. Lila’s as much a ghost in this world as they are, ghosts of a time that doesn’t exist anymore. Perhaps she’s even more of one, because at least they’ve gone and possessed the bodies of their counterparts. </p><p>“Is that so?” wonders Luther.</p><p>“I don’t know,” Five admits, “But we wouldn’t have known anyway, so I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t really matter. We’re here, and she’s here, and it’s all a mess.” </p><p>“Oh,” Klaus says. “Well.”</p><p>“And listen,” Five says, leaning in carefully. “If you see her, you <em> run, </em> alright? No bullshit. I know you can get away from her. You find somewhere to hide out, and stay put until Luther and I are back for you.”</p><p>“How long’ll that be?” Klaus asks.</p><p>“Depends. A lot of things could go a lot of ways.”</p><p>“What he’s saying,” Luther says, “Is that we’ll be back for you by the end of the day. Just meet us back here, alright? This bridge, this street corner. Tonight. And if you’re not here, we’ll take it to mean that you’re hiding out from her, and we’ll come looking. Done?” </p><p>“Done,” Klaus promises, reaching up to take Luther’s big hand into his, and shaking it. </p><p>They don’t leave right away, and Klaus is kind of grateful for it. He hasn’t been alone, truly <em> alone, </em> in a long time, and he’ll be doing it now, in a city he’s never been in, in a <em> country </em>he’s never been to. It makes his heart kick in his chest, and he can’t tell if it’s excitement or worry. </p><p>Five stalks off, throwing a comment over his shoulder about finding a sign that’ll tell him if they’ve dropped Klaus in the right town, which they have. Five nods curtly in the direction of his brothers from down the street, confirming that they have, in fact, landed in Innsbruck, as he’d hoped. </p><p>Klaus and Luther drink in the view of the white crags of the mountains, rising like icebergs above the town, of the strip of buildings across the street from where they’ve landed. They’re painted in a rainbow of pastels, looking to Klaus like a series of enormous birthday cakes.</p><p>“It’s pretty here,” Luther says, and Klaus feels himself swelling like a peacock. <em> I’m </em> from <em> here, </em> he thinks, and he’s immensely grateful that he’s from somewhere beautiful, and so full of colors. Which, of course, is wonderfully ironic, given that he’s once again dressed head to toe in black.</p><p>A part of Klaus had been afraid of coming here, of surrendering the fantasy for the reality. The idea of what <em> might be </em> is far greater than what <em> is, </em> and he’d felt himself tugged back and forth between wanting to come here so badly it made his chest hurt, and feeling it seize up with fear that it wouldn’t be as he’d hoped.</p><p>Well, he has to say, it’s even <em> better. </em> </p><p>He even feels considerably less daunted by the prospect of being alone here, knowing that there’s so much to look at. </p><p>“You know where you’re going?” Luther asks, and Klaus nods, digging into his pocket to fish out the page with his information on it. Five peers over his shoulder at it, curious as a cat.  </p><p>Annoyingly, there hadn’t been a home address provided, unlike the others’. But there’s a school address, where Klaus supposes his mother had worked, and he figures that it’s still a fantastic clue; after all, who could possibly forget a woman keeling over and giving birth in a school hallway? Even if almost thirty years have passed, he’s pretty sure someone there remembers it. Kids were most certainly scarred for life on that fine day. </p><p>“Yes,” Klaus says. “And <em> yes, </em> I packed my lunch box and everything.”</p><p>Luther rolls his eyes, but pats Klaus on the shoulder indulgently. “Take care?”</p><p>“I always do.”</p><p><em> Ooh, </em> okay. Bad joke. Klaus raises his hands in supplication. </p><p>“Really though,” Luther says, “Take care.”</p><p>  Klaus nods.</p><p>He turns, and begins to head down a narrow side-street, but pauses, turning to peer at them over his shoulder. “You guys too, okay?”</p><p>Five nods, raising a hand to wave him off. </p><p>They watch him lope around the corner, and vanish around a pastel pink building, a strange, dark little scrap of shadow. </p><p>“You think this is what it’s like, dropping your kid off at school?” Five remarks.</p><p>“I mean, I’d hope that I wouldn’t be worried that my kid won’t immediately run off and start doing drugs, but… yeah. I think so.”</p><p>“Huh.” Five cocks his head. “Interesting.” </p><p>Five, ordinarily a stickler for timeliness, seems rather reluctant to stop leaning on the railing, to tear his eyes off the street, to get moving. They’re only dropping Klaus off in Austria, after all; they have someone waiting for them in Germany, and really ought to get jumping to greet her. </p><p>Luther can sense his reluctance without having to ask him about it. A part of him is secretly worried that Five will just snatch Luther by the arm and bring them right back to the bunker in the mountains. </p><p>Five, for the record, is seriously considering just that. </p><p>“What is it?” Luther asks. “Why don’t you want this?”</p><p>“What are you talking about?” Five scoffs. “Of course I do.” </p><p>Luther frowns at him.</p><p>“Fine, I’m not exactly thrilled,” Five relents. </p><p>“I <em> know </em> that,” Luther says, “But for the life of me I just… I don’t understand <em> why.” </em></p><p>Luther had thought about his birth mother when he was a child. But he’d never really spoken about her to anyone. He’d never dared to; it had felt like too much of a slight against their father, who had eyes and ears everywhere, and was quite vengeful against those who showed him the slightest sign of disloyalty. </p><p>He’d thought about her, trying to picture what she might look like, what sort of house she lived in, what she did for a living, whether she ever thought about him, whether she watched the television religiously, hoping for a glimpse of him, smiling fondly at the boy she’d given up for the good of the world. </p><p>He’d always thought of her in that context, of a distant faceless figure, one that never would have been a true part of his life. In fact, he’d never been able to picture her face, only her hair, and the shape of her body, and her profile. He hadn’t even been brave enough to wonder if her eyes were the same shade of bluish-green as his. </p><p>But now, being free from his favor, free to make his own choices, to seek out his own life, Luther isn’t afraid of imagining otherwise. When he’d read their mother’s name out, read the name of the city in which he and Five were born, he felt his mind expand with all the possibilities. The door had been thrown open to another world, to a world where Luther would’ve grown up speaking German, where his mother would be made of flesh and blood instead of rubber and wire, where he would’ve never stooped over with the weight of the world on his shoulders. </p><p>“Don’t you want to know?” Luther presses. “Five, we have a <em> mother. </em> We come from somewhere, and if Dad hadn’t found us, we’d still <em> be </em>there. We’d have grown up there, and we’d have different names and different lives. Aren’t you curious about that? Don’t you want to know who you might’ve been?” </p><p>Five grits his teeth.</p><p>He isn’t afraid of that. Five’s quite content with who he is, or rather, he’s learned to be. It’s everyone else that he’s worried about. He’s wondering if they’ll decide that they were better off apart, if they might even decide to stay that way. </p><p>And sure, these people they are aren’t <em> great </em>by any stretch of the imagination, but they’ve earned these lives. They’ve fought for them, killed for them, crawled through mud and ash and dust for them, and he feels a flood of hostility towards the woman who’d had him, for disrupting the delicate balance of that with her mere existence. </p><p>Five grits his teeth. “You do realize that if everything had been different, we wouldn’t exist, right? You really want that?” </p><p>“Not everything. We’d still be brothers.” </p><p>Five looks to Luther, studying him carefully.  </p><p>"You really think this is right?" he asks quietly.</p><p>"I think it's necessary."</p><p>“Then I’ll go along with it,” Five says through his teeth, as if Luther had asked him to saw off his left arm.</p><p>But Luther buys it, smiling and reaching for Five, expecting to be teleported. Five obliges, bearing them off in a flash to northern Germany. </p><p>He lands, and feels a knot of unease roiling through him. It isn't from the jump.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Having been alive for only a few short months, there are a lot of things Ben had to relearn. </p><p>That he really <em> does </em> have to wait for the light at an intersection to change before he starts walking. That he can’t just make any old comment in the middle of a family meeting, because now, his family can actually <em> hear </em>him. That he needs to pace himself on those mountain hikes with Five, because exhaustion isn’t a thing that happens to ghosts. </p><p>And, apparently, that wearing heavy black clothing to Mexico in the middle of summer is a bad idea, actually. </p><p>Ben’s sitting in the shade of an enormous palm tree, panting like a dog, hating himself for losing that coin toss with Allison, the one that had determined which of them got to keep the Minerva. </p><p>At least overheating shuts his monsters up. They haven’t been this quiet since he was dead. </p><p>“God, Ben, it’s only six in the morning. You’ve got to get it together if you’re gonna make it through the rest of the day,” Diego drawls with an amused grin on his face.</p><p>It isn't <em>that</em> hot. Or, rather, it's only hot because the two of them have acclimatized to life in the upper mountains of Norway.</p><p>“I’m fine. I’m totally fine. I’m adjusting.”</p><p>“You could adjust by taking that big hoodie off.”</p><p>“No thanks. I’m good.”</p><p>Diego shrugs at him. “Your funeral. The second one, I might add.”</p><p>Ben whips his hoodie off, crumples it into a ball of black fabric, and throws it at Diego’s head. And then is whacked by it, when Diego catches it in midair, and sends it sailing back into Ben’s face like a third-rate haunted house’s cheap ghost trick.</p><p> Which, he is reluctant to admit aloud, is kind of hilarious. So he lets it slide, tying it off around his waist, and tugging himself to his feet. </p><p>“You think anyone saw us?” Diego asks. “The Minerva?”</p><p>“Oh,” Ben glances around. No one’s out on the streets yet, at least, no one he can see. “Doubt it. If anyone does, you suppose they’ll think we’re aliens?”</p><p>Diego snorts. “Sure. Come on. It’s this way.”</p><p>He starts off, and Ben follows him. They walk in silence, Ben staring at the enormous fleshy arms of the cacti they pass, at an enormous mural of a graceful big cat occupying an entire wall, at the graceful, brightly-colored architecture. Diego keeps his eyes on the road ahead. </p><p>He’s thinking about that map. The one mounted on the wall of the bunker, the map of <em> them, </em> of where they come from. There were thirteen pins in total, scattered across five continents and a dozen countries. </p><p>Diego had added a fourteenth, right before they’d left. He’d dug it into England, right where London would be, if the map showed cities. He remembers Five’s gaze burning into the back of his neck, remembers knowing that Five knew the exact street and house in question. It’s almost funny, those sudden reminders that oh, <em> yeah, </em> Five used to be an intertemporal hitman. If, of course, he hadn’t had the direct consequence of one such hit carve a knife into his eye socket.</p><p>If there’d been Lila, in addition to the Sparrows, then maybe...</p><p>“You think there are others?” Diego asks. “More of <em> us, </em> I mean.”</p><p>“There were,” Ben says certainly. “At least, there was one other, in Dad’s notes. Assuming we can trust that he’s it, which I don’t.”</p><p>“Oh?”</p><p>“Yeah. A boy, born down in Antarctica at some scientific station. Dad went down to get him, but by the time he got there, the baby had died.” Ben grimaces. “His mom was, uh. Outside. When she had him.”</p><p>“Oh. Fuck.”</p><p>“Yeah. Fuck.”</p><p>Despite the heat, Ben shivers. He supposes that Antarctica Baby wins the informal worst-place-to-be-born contest that the siblings had started one night in exceptionally poor taste, after getting bored and tipsy enough to try it. </p><p>Diego’s considering what it might’ve been like, to grow up knowing where he’d have come from, the way the Sparrows have…</p><p>Had.</p><p>He shakes his head. Decides to think about something else.</p><p>Diego remembers Klaus hovering before that map like a child might dance around the edge of a Christmas tree, reaching up, and twanging a black-tipped pin over and over, the one that’s <em> his, </em> the one stuck in itty bitty little Austria. Then, he would reach out and touch everyone’s. Two in one place in Germany. One in Russia, in the Caribbean, in southern California, in western Mexico. <em> That’s us, </em> he would say, and Diego could hear the wonder in his voice. </p><p>Then, his mind turns inevitably to the others. To the little red-tipped ones stuck in the Philippines, in the far north of Canada, in coastal Chile and New Zealand and Japan, and even at the far north of Norway; the latter, Luther had suspected, had been the reasoning for why their father had chosen to base the Sparrows here. Perhaps it’d been easier to set up camp nearby. </p><p>He tries to put faces to the places, but it’s difficult. He is only able to place the blonde woman, who couldn’t look more stereotypically Scandinavian if she’d been wearing a horned helmet and carrying a battleaxe. Everyone else… he just doesn’t know. He hadn’t gotten a good enough look at them. </p><p>“One of the Sparrows,” he spits out, to try and turn his thoughts away from the churning feeling in his chest. “She was from Norway. Right around where the bunker was.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Kirkenes. That was the town’s name. No idea if I’m pronouncing it right.”</p><p>Ben blinks. “We’ve <em> been </em>there. Five and I, I mean. We went there on an errand.” </p><p>He thinks about it, about one of their mothers, being so close they could’ve just stopped in for tea. He thinks about doing it, about turning up on her doorstep and smiling, and telling her, <em> hi, I’m Ben, one of your daughter’s brothers. By the way, she died horrifically, and we buried her in pieces in the mountains just a few hours away.  </em></p><p>His stomach corkscrews, and he plants a splayed hand over it. “Small world,” he says, his face turning greenish. </p><p>Diego’s warm hand finds its way to the center of his back, and Ben focuses on the weight of it until the twisting in his gut stops. It's replaced by a tense feeling in his chest that isn't unpleasant at all, that he finds he almost wants <em>back,</em> when Diego withdraws his hand.</p><p>“You think she ever went there? You think she met her mother?”</p><p>“No,” Ben says firmly. “Dad wouldn’t have allowed it.”</p><p>Diego nods. “You’re right.” </p><p>“Crusty old fuck,” Ben snarls unexpectedly. </p><p>Diego laughs, impressed by the sudden outburst. <em>Damn, Klaus really did keep you all to himself for too long, huh? I </em>miss<em> this.</em></p><p>"You know,” Ben says, craning his neck to take a look at a large palm they're passing under. “I’ve never been to Mexico before. I thought it’d be neat. I was right.”</p><p>Diego frowns at him. “Is that it? Why you’re going along with this? Free trips?”</p><p>Ben shrugs. “It helps.” </p><p>Ben, Diego knows, is of a similar trepidation regarding what they’re here to do. “We could just… <em> not </em>do it, you know,” Diego says, not quite meaning it at all. But it feels good, to float an alternative, to see where Ben’s at. To see if he can convince Ben, and in doing so, convince himself. “We could hang out in town for a few hours, or just hit the road.”</p><p>“Hit the road?”</p><p>“Sure. Road trip it up to L.A. Go to the beach or something until Allison comes to pick us up.” </p><p>Ben smiles. “We can’t do that.”</p><p>“No?”</p><p>“See, the way I look at it is, it’s not really a question as to <em> whether </em> I’ll meet my birth mother,” Ben explains, “It’s like a sort of eventuality. That I <em> have to </em>know her, that I have to learn where I’m from if I’m to understand where I’m going. It’s like that for you guys too, I think.”</p><p>Diego nods. “That’s pretty deep. You come up with it on the ride over?”</p><p>“Absolutely," Ben says, "What’s your holdup?” </p><p>“My... holdup.”</p><p>“Yeah. Your holdup. I can tell you’re not looking forward to this either." Oh, right. Ben's been dead so long that Diego's nearly forgotten how quickly he can see through him.</p><p>"You have a problem with it?"</p><p>"No, not at all. Actually, I think it's a good thing." Sensing Diego's surprise, Ben continues. "I mean... thinking about everyone else, and what they're about to walk into, I think it's just <em>safer,</em> looking at it the way I do. In fact, I'm worried for them. That they'll end up feeling disappointed in the worst ways."</p><p>"Klaus?"</p><p>"Klaus."</p><p>"You think he should be here, with us?"</p><p>Ben sighs. "Honestly, not at all. I've held his hand for a long time, and it only ever helped some."</p><p>"Hey. You had his back for years. He's here because of you. Don't discount that."</p><p>"You don't disagree?"</p><p>Diego considers his words carefully. "I think this is something he needs to do for himself. Just like the rest of us." He clenches his jaw, and unclenches it. “As for what's holding me back, I already have a mother,” he says guardedly. </p><p>“Then why are you going through with it? Why not, as you've said, just fuck off to the beach or something?”</p><p>“Closure, same as you. But," he says, "Yours isn't to do with Grace, is it?" </p><p>He’s very aware that his fondness of Grace isn’t exactly a popular sentiment. For many of his siblings, her robotic nature supersedes her affections. Only recently had he found himself agreeing with them, but it still doesn’t negate those years of care, or the warm feelings they’ve instilled in him. Those feelings aren't going away, and he's just going to have to make sense of them as best as he can. A mother who gives false, programmed affection is better than a mother who gives none at all. </p><p>“No,” Ben agrees. “It’s to do with the woman herself. I mean, what regard could I have for someone who gave me up before I could ever have known her? I had a <em> price tag. </em> How can I possibly forgive something like <em> that?” </em></p><p>Diego swallows. It's an insight like that, harsh as it is, that makes Diego sincerely grateful that Ben is with him, to keep his feet on the ground, to provide him with someone to keep an eye on, someone to focus him. It <em>surprises</em> him.</p><p>“Hey, Ben?”</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“Thanks for being here."</p><p>He'd assumed that they’re together mostly for convenience; they’d been born within a day’s drive of one another, and therefore it was deemed more advantageous for the two of them to stick together. Or, to be more exact, Ben had told Allison to drop the both of them off at Álamos, rather than making a separate trip to Los Angeles just for him, which had more or less doomed the two of them to an inevitable day-long road trip across the border.</p><p><em>You didn't just do this out of convenience, did you?</em> Diego realizes, not at all surprised. The thing that does surprise him, is that he's actually happy that he did. Because the thing is, even though there’s a giant, Klaus-shaped elephant in the room, he knows for a fact that he wouldn't have been able to do this alone.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Vanya hates the Minerva. </p><p>The thing flies smoothly, which, of course it does; it’s how she’d gotten to Norway, after all. And Allison and Diego are decent enough pilots of it, so it isn’t that she’d been tossed around the back as if she’d been on the world’s strangest rollercoaster. She’d just been jostled in a mildly frightening way, the way she’d expect to be jostled if she were trapped in a car with an anxious teenager learning to drive. </p><p>It’s that she can’t look at the empty seats to her side and not think about who’d been there before. She kept blinking, and seeing Carla, leaning across the aisle to rest an elegant brown hand on Vanya’s knee, to smile at her. She’d taken the orange domino mask off, and when she smiled, the deep red creases left by it crinkled painfully. </p><p>Vanya had always wondered about those marks, whenever she’d see them on her siblings. She’d always wanted to reach out and touch them, to see if they’d disappear under her fingertips. When she’d done it to Carla, nothing had changed. </p><p>Vanya doesn’t want to think about her. So naturally, she thinks about her a lot. Her and the rest of them. Vanya spent hours upon hours wondering if the ghosts were here, if they were clinging to her, if they were reaching out to touch her with their pale, spectral fingers. Klaus keeps telling her no, they’re gone, they’re not anywhere, but she can never be sure if she believes that, not when Carla keeps appearing in her dreams, blooming open with blood at the center of a sonic typhoon.</p><p>Vanya almost laughs, thinking about it, how killing her had done nothing to stop the dreams; they’re even worse now, knowing that they’re coming from her own mind, and not someone else’s. </p><p><em> I did it for them, </em> Vanya thinks, as she does every night when she wakes up, sweaty and a little distressed, and every day when she passes The Room She Will Never Enter. <em> I’m not sorry I did it, and if I were to leap back in time by a month, I’d do it again.  </em></p><p>She still feels terrible.</p><p>She’ll have to ask Five about it later. She gets the sense he knows what this awful intestinal corkscrewing feeling is, and so maybe he knows what to do with it.</p><p>For now, she’ll just have to wait. </p><p>Vanya glances through the window at Allison, reclining in the salon chair, her mouth pressed in a tense line as the woman weaving her braids tugs on her scalp. After they’d dropped Ben and Diego off, they’d made their way to the city of Allison’s mother, where Allison had insisted they take a break, so she might get her hair done.</p><p>“When I meet my mother,” Allison had explained, “I want to look my best. First impressions are important, Vanya.”</p><p>So Vanya allowed it. She doesn’t begrudge her it; rather, she has decided not to have an opinion at all about Allison’s insistence on using their father’s line of credit, which, as a small plus to being quietly and unceremoniously invited back into the fold, they have been reinstated onto, to buy a beautiful new outfit that wasn’t stained with grease and dirt and blood and a completely new hairdo. Vanya will never have to think about that, about whether she should make herself prettier to impress her mother.  </p><p>She politely declined Allison’s invitation to come in and touch up her roots. Allison had accepted it without question, and had suggested that, given that Allison would be indisposed for about four hours, Vanya should wait in the Minerva, which they’ve parked rather sloppily on a rooftop.</p><p>But Vanya can’t do that. She can’t sit in that glorified tin can for any longer than she absolutely has to. She might feel her breaths coming faster and faster and faster, or find herself starting to cry for no reason at all. </p><p>She’s also having a bit of trouble looking at Allison; she and Luther have reached that gooey stage that couples reach when they can’t get their hands off each other, which Vanya doesn’t have a problem with. It’s not that she’s envious or anything, definitely not that. It’s that she’d made the fatal mistake of reaching out with her senses an hour before they’d boarded the Minerva and… well. She’d heard exactly how close the two had gotten. And she’d rather not think about <em> that </em>either. Envy is unbecoming of her.</p><p>Instead, she takes a walk through downtown Montreal, her violin case swinging in one hand, and Mr. Pennycrumb’s leash in the other. Five had insisted that she and Allison bring him along, and while she’d found his request a little vexing at the time, now she’s grateful for the puppy’s company. He’s calm and attentive, and is keeping to her heels very carefully. Five had a habit of disappearing for long hours with the dog, and though he had insisted that she learn to command Mr. Pennycrumb as well, she’d only ever done so under his watchful eye. </p><p>She keeps a tight grip on the leash; Mr. Pennycrumb hasn’t been in a city before, and if Vanya’s feeling this skittish, she can’t imagine how he’s feeling, even if his wrinkly, vaguely gargoyle-like face betrays nothing.</p><p>The weight of the case starts to make her shoulder burn, so she decides to stop. Vanya settles down onto an empty bench, typing Mr. Pennycrumb’s lead to the arm, and tugs out her violin. </p><p>The last time she’d used it, she’d been killing her family. </p><p>Vanya shakes her head to dislodge the train of thought, her stubby ponytail bouncing. </p><p>She always tends to play, when she feels upset. Her violin had been a source of incredible comfort for her when she was young, and when she was ordinary, and it will be one to her now. And besides, she hasn’t truly <em> played, </em> in a while. So Vanya decides she’s going to put the violin to use again, to use it to make <em> music </em>again. She draws the instrument out, brings it up to her chin, and begins playing.  </p><p>And as she plays, she peers around. </p><p>The world is so different, from the one they’ve left; Five had told her that it hadn’t been all their fault. It’d been them, sure, but it was also the Commission, or it’s lack of continued influence on the timeline, and the resulting tiny divergences in free will that had rippled into massive sweeping changes.</p><p>Vanya, standing in the center of a square and busking as she is, has a front row seat to some of those changes. There are the strange handheld phones again, the ones with the comically-long antennas that look like something out of a science fiction movie. There are the chimpanzees, threaded here and there through the crowd, wearing smart suits and dresses and carrying briefcases and pushing strollers. There are the computers, which are still boxy, but not nearly as cumbersome as she remembers them; it seems like they're in more places than just libraries now, and the internet, from what Diego has told her, is something she's probably going to have to learn to use soon, which she finds to be a rather daunting task. There are a few cars whose make she does not recognize at all. </p><p>It’s nice, knowing that all the ripples had not stemmed from them, that they are not the only things to have changed. </p><p>In fact, one thing would have been the same: In the world that no longer exists, the world from which they hail, they were born to these same women in these same places. </p><p>Which means that even in the world that doesn’t exist anymore, Vanya’s mother is dead.</p><p> She’d found out right away, and the news had hit her like the stab of a dull knife through her chest.</p><p>Their father’s files on their birth mothers had been brief. Just a page or two of neat, clinical typewritten notes on the children. On where they were located, the circumstances through which they had been born, the dollar amounts their father had paid for them, their mother’s names, and an extra detail or two.</p><p><em> Funny, </em> Vanya thinks sourly, <em> how just a few words can change so much. </em></p><p>For example, Allison had been born in Martinique, but the address their father had obtained her at is listed in Montreal. Her mother, it is noted, had only been visiting the island when Allison had been born. Hence, their presence in Canada, instead of the Caribbean.</p><p>And for example, under Vanya’s mother’s address had been written, quite dismissively: <em> received further communications from the Belinsky family. Family seeking financial compensation citing death of T. Belinskaya due to complications arising from birth. Breach of contract, sue accordingly. </em></p><p>Vanya’s bow drags sharply across the strings, sending an uncharacteristically sour note spinning off into the air. Beside her, Mr. Pennycrumb lifts his head off his great paws and whimpers. </p><p>She sighs, blinking the blurriness from her eyes, and stops playing. She'd cried enough, after she'd read it, and she'd cried plenty of days after that. But this isn't meant to be about her. So Vanya screws her eyes shut, to listen to the steady drumbeat of her heart, to reach out and pluck at the hearts of the people passing her by, to listen to jingle of change dropping into her violin case, which, alright, sure, she’ll take, even if she hadn’t totally intended to ask anyone for change. </p><p>Vanya checks a clock hanging outside a building; a few hours have passed, so Allison should be done by now.</p><p>Good. Vanya’s here for Allison anyway. She’s here for her, to be of support to her while she meets her mother, and she shouldn’t be thinking about a teenage girl who’d died in December of 1989, whose death was her fault. </p><p>Vanya puts her violin away, and begins walking back. They’d agreed that Vanya would meet her at the Minerva when all was done, so that’s where she heads, bypassing the upscale salon and peeking quickly in the window to determine that yes, Allison has concluded her appointment, and left. </p><p>She finds Allison on the roof of the apartment building they’d parked the Minerva on. She’s sitting on the edge of the roof, with the perfect posture of a cat. Her legs hang down into the open air, her hair playing in the summer breeze. The sun breaks free from the thick band of white clouds it’d been hiding behind to illuminate Vanya’s sister; the particular shade of blonde Allison had chosen to thread through her braids catches the light and glows golden, in a way Vanya has not seen in months, that makes it look like she’s woven sunbeams into her hair. She looks like herself again, like the Allison that had been before they’d leapt into a new timeline. </p><p>Allison takes a minute to notice her; she’s busily painting her nails. Being that she is no longer on the run, Allison has finally found the time to indulge in the traditional hour of peace she used to give herself, when she would go find a sunny spot in her mansion in California and sit and go over every nail twice with a brush. While she would wait for them to dry, she would look out the window, or listen to the radio, or watch whatever was on television. Even in Dallas, she had maintained this ritual, and now it is finally back in her life. </p><p>Allison grimaces at the job she’s doing, which is rather messy. It’s been a while since she’s done this. But she’s basically done, splaying her fingers wide and lifting them up to the sun, watching the pale polish shimmer in the light with a pleased smile. She feels as if she’s won a sort of victory with her body; there will be none of those heavy shades of black and blue and purple that her other self had liked so much. Sure, one of her hands is unnaturally distended and eerily claw-like, but at least the claws are the way <em> she </em>prefers them.</p><p>“Hey,” Vanya says, and Allison starts a little, wobbling just a bit before regaining her excellent balance. </p><p>“Oh, hey.” Allison pats the spot of roof beside her, and reaches just behind her, to tug out a coffee that Vanya had not noticed until now. “Café au lait?”</p><p>“Uh...”</p><p>“It’s coffee with milk.”</p><p>“Oh. Right.” Vanya accepts it, and scoots Allison's brand-new heeled boots away, so she can sit on the ledge beside her. “Thanks.”</p><p>“Those French lessons slipping your mind?”</p><p>“Yeah, it’s been a while.” Vanya sips.</p><p>"Haven't been keeping up?"</p><p>"Being a violinist, you don't really need any other languages. And speaking them got me all those nanny jobs back when I did it, but everybody wants a multilingual nanny, but nobody's really serious about you teaching the kids any of them."</p><p>"Really?"</p><p>"Yeah, it's a bragging thing."</p><p>"No, I mean, that you were a nanny?"</p><p>"For a few years after college." Vanya frowns, staring at the ring of deep maroon her lipstick had left on the tip of her straw. "I hated it." </p><p>Allison snorts. "Strong words."</p><p>"I mean them. I think kids are alright--some of them are great, there are a few you just want to kick off a roof-- but taking care of them all the time isn't for me. I hate babysitting, and nannying's just live-in babysitting. I only took that job because there was nothing else for years. It took <em>time</em> to get into the city orchestra."</p><p>"But you got there."</p><p>"Oh, I fucking <em>got</em> there," Vanya brandishes her drink, then stills, her brow creasing. "Well. Part of the way there. I still had to teach lessons." </p><p>"Is that any better?"</p><p>"Kind of. At least I got to play. But so many of those kids were better than me, and I kept telling myself it was temporary. That I'd only be doing it until I made it to first chair." Vanya glares. "Then it just... never happened. All those years went by and I was still there."</p><p>Allison nods, deciding not to dig any deeper there. She spent her entire adult life, up until a few months ago, in constant luxury, wanting for nothing, able to open her mouth and have everything brought to her on a silver platter. She doubts she'll be able to say something nuanced enough for Vanya to take well. So, she decides to change the subject. "Speaking of college," Allison says, sipping her own drink, the one with the order so complicated she had most certainly made the barista contemplate murder. "How is it?"</p><p>"What, you're thinking about going?"</p><p>"Yeah," Allison says, nodding. "I mean, why <em>not,</em> right? I don't really care about acting anymore, and Dad isn't pissed at us anymore, so he could pay for it; I mean, he did with <em>you,</em> so... sure? I've got time. It might help me figure out what I'll do next. Oh, and those libraries are so <em>big,</em> too. That would be <em>so</em> fun..."</p><p>"You don't have to go to college to get into the libraries."</p><p>"Really?"</p><p>"Really. After I graduated I'd still just walk right in and spend a whole day at the city college library. You can't exactly check anything out if you don't go there, but you can read, and sit somewhere, and... It's a <em>library,</em> Allison. You've <em>been</em> to a university library, right?" </p><p>Allison, who had never set foot on a university campus in her life, says, "Yes?"</p><p>Vanya rolls her eyes. "I'll take you sometime."</p><p>Mr. Pennycrumb barks, offering his imput in whatever language dogs speak. That, or he's demanding attention, which Allison gives excitably. She leans around Vanya, to scratch at Mr. Pennycrumb’s head. “Oh, <em>hi</em> puppy!” she gushes, her voice turning gushy and sugary as a gumdrop and strangely high-pitched, as she tugs out a cup of whipped cream. “I got something for <em> you </em>too!” </p><p>Mr. Pennycrumb accepts Allison’s gift enthusiastically, his stumpy little tail wiggling, and Allison glances up at Vanya, her face suddenly turning stonily serious as she says “don’t tell Five.”</p><p>Vanya nods, smiling at a blot of white that’s stuck to the top of Mr. Pennycrumb’s nose, then turning to take a look at what Allison had done to her hair. “I like your...” Vanya blinks. A few of the braids are threaded through with purple, not blonde. Allison catches her, reaching up to play with one of them, a storm of emotion crossing her face. </p><p>“You kept some of the purple?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Allison says softly. “It grew on me.”</p><p>She’d decided she wanted her old hair back, but she hadn’t given up on all of it; Allison thinks it’s important, in a way that she doesn’t totally understand, that she keeps a tiny bit of the person she’d never been with her. That she <em> remembers </em>that somewhere in the universe, there had been an Allison who had never left home, who had never had a child, who had hated the sister she’s bumping shoulders affectionately with on a rooftop. That Allison isn’t real anymore, but she had been once, and she wants to honor that in her own little way. </p><p>“It looks good.”</p><p>“Thanks.”</p><p>Below them, Mr. Pennycrumb snuffles as he slurps the last of the whipped cream off of his nose, and they burst into laughter as he plops down and stares longingly at Allison’s drink, his eyes turning large and cowlike. </p><p>“So,” Vanya says, her voice a little scratchy. “How are we going to do this?”</p><p>“Well, we have the address, so I figure we just knock on the door, right? She’ll let us in.” Allison tilts her head. “Do you think I look like her? It’d make sense, wouldn’t it?” </p><p>Vanya hums, swallowing thickly. “Would you like me to wait outside? I could take Mr. Pennycrumb for another walk. He likes to smell things--”</p><p>“No,” Allison says, with an intensity that surprises even her. “No. I want you with me.” </p><p>“Really?” </p><p>“Yes. Of course. It’s really important that we get this right, you know? And you’re a part of that. I want you to be there when I tell her.”  </p><p>“Tell her what?”</p><p>“That I’m pregnant,” Allison says proudly.</p><p>Vanya drops her coffee, and it explodes on the sidewalk ten stories below them. </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Lila still doesn’t know how to teleport properly, not at such a distance. There is no one to help her learn.</p><p>She’d jumped, and landed where she wanted to go, but once again, she’d found that she’d been winding the clock up unintentionally. She lands there weeks after she’d intended, landing in a fenced-in little yard on a street she hasn’t been on in decades, in the middle of a gray English summer morning, one warm enough for her to tug the coral-orange leather jacket she’d taken from the bunker off her shoulders and fold it over her arm as she rolls the sleeves of her turtleneck up. </p><p>Not that it really matters, that she’d landed later than she had wanted. She <em> escaped </em> them, she escaped the Umbrella Academy, <em> and </em>the Sparrow Academy, and the sonic rage of Vanya Hargreeves, and the creature that’d been worming its way through her gut, and they will never find her. They’ll have given up by now, if they even bothered to look at all. </p><p>The street is the same as it is in her dreams, a strip of tightly-packed flats with tidy little gardens, rising over a hill as if they were the swell of a wave. When Lila was little, she used to imagine that there was a monster living under the street responsible for the bulge in the earth, that it was sound asleep, but <em> someday </em>it would wake up and break out from its cocoon of brick and mortar and ornamental shrubbery and eat the neighborhood whole.</p><p>It seems that the monster has not stirred yet. Everything is still here. </p><p>Lila stares at the door of the garden flat, swallowing the bile that creeps up in her throat. The number is the same, but the brass is tarnished and scratched, and it feels filthy when she brings her fingertips up to it.</p><p>But the door is the wrong color. It’s not red anymore, it’s <em> green. </em> </p><p>Lila looks for the key above the door, but does not find it. Instead, it’s under the kitschy <em> Welcome! </em> mat. It judders in the door a bit, but it eventually caves in, once she shoves her bony shoulder against the wood and pushes. </p><p>The door opens. </p><p>Lila wants to open her mouth, and say “Hello! I’m home!” but her mouth won’t open. It’s like her voice is trapped inside her somehow, tangled up with all the others, and a part of her is too afraid to let her speak at all, for fear of which one will spill out of her. </p><p>Their powers aren’t with her anymore, but their voices are. All of their memories, the last shrieking thoughts they’d screamed in their minds before she’d blinked away, or before they’d stopped thinking anything at all. </p><p>All of them.</p><p>Lila pauses in the entryway, listening for the scuffling of footsteps, a muffled shout. It’s quiet inside the flat, and all the noise is coming from inside her head, a dozen voices all tangled up in each others’ noise, a ball of sound rolling in a frenzy around and around the inside of her skull, and it won’t <em> leave </em>until she bites her tongue until it bleeds.  </p><p><em> No one’s here, </em> she concludes, swallowing a mouthful of sticky blood. She doesn’t understand why she isn’t happy, to be uninterrupted. She <em> should </em>be.</p><p>Lila steps inside, stopping to toe off her boots and line them up by the door.  </p><p>The kitchen is the first room she greets when she enters the flat, as it was when she’d last left it. </p><p>Lila looks at the tile first. She cannot help it; her eyes are drawn immediately to it and there she is kept, standing utterly still, staring at the floor, searching for the tiniest speck of blood.</p><p>There isn’t one. The tile isn’t even the same pattern anymore. </p><p>Her chest feels like it’s full of thorny fists, battering her from the inside. She’s tired, and her eyes are burning. </p><p>Lila tears her eyes away, raking them across the kitchen, which does not have yellow walls anymore. She makes a beeline for the bedroom at the end of the short hall, bursting the door open, only to find that the walls are no longer bright blue, and there are no cartoon mermaids on the bedspread, the one her mother had let her pick out. </p><p>She lies on the bed that does not have the mermaid bedspread, and stares at how her feet trail over the edge, wiggling them experimentally. She rolls over, and falls into a black, horrible sleep that jerks her awake however many hours later, sweaty and shaking and full of terrible dreams about peeling open from the inside, becoming a host to worms that had swarmed up from some dark place deep inside of her. </p><p>There’s a rabbit in the bedroom that had been hers once, and Lila plucks it out of its cage, dragging her back down the wall she’s leaning on until she plops to the ground. The fat little animal sits in her lap, and lets her dig her nails into the back of its head, making soft little thumping noises with its feet that fail to brighten her stormy mood. </p><p>She lets it wander across the flat, and doesn’t bother returning it to its cage. </p><p>She wants to touch everything, so she does. Lila runs her hands along the walls and over the bedspread and the cushions of a couch she doesn’t recognize, and along the smooth curve of the bathtub and over the glass of the windows. The shape of the flat is the same, but the smells and the colors and the textures are all different. She goes and gets a knife from the kitchen and digs it into the wall, to try and peel away at it until she finds the color she remembers.</p><p>She doesn’t. She just makes a mess.</p><p>She throws open the refrigerator and the cabinet doors, staring at its contents numbly, vaguely aware that she <em> should </em>be eating, but having no desire to do so.</p><p>There are a lot of photographs, hanging on the walls, arranged in decorative frames on tables. She supposes that’s what ordinary families do, they take lots of photos of each other and keep them lying around, but then, she wouldn’t know much about that, would she? </p><p>Each one she sees, she turns over. They aren’t Ronnie and Anita, so she could care less who they are. </p><p>It makes her angry, in a way she doesn’t totally understand, that someone else lives here. That the flat had moved on, when she could not. </p><p>She wanders in worrisome circles through the flat, pacing around and around and around, wondering what exactly it is that she’d come here to find. </p><p>She always circles back to the kitchen, to the floor. </p><p>Lila lies down, right where they’d laid. She folds her hands behind her back and twisting her neck up to look for a wide-eyed little girl hiding under the bed at the end of the hall.</p><p>It doesn’t help at all.</p><p>She presses her forehead against the tile, which is blessedly cool, and presses harder and harder, drawing her hand up to curl loosely on the floor beside her face, staring at her nails. At her thin brown fingers, at the spatters of blood that are still on them.</p><p>She sits up. Stands up. Walks to the kitchen sink, and starts scrubbing.</p><p>She doesn’t stop with the blood. She starts picking at the white polish on her fingernails, scraping it off in stripes before scratching at the last bothersome flecks that just won’t. get. off. </p><p>She keeps scratching.</p><p>And scratching. And scratching.</p><p>It starts to hurt, but it’s a nice sort of hurt. A hurt that makes <em> sense, </em> a hurt that is <em> hers, </em> and not theirs, not the hurt the Sparrows had felt when she’d killed them, a pain she felt blooming in her body as it had been inflicted, a pain that had somehow circled back onto her. Not the hurt that is tangled up in her mind and burning in her limbs, like a ghostly sort of fire.</p><p>Lila stops when her fingers are wrinkly from the water. She leaves bright red handprints on the towel. Mother would slap her for making such a mess, but she finds that she doesn't care at all what Mother would think anymore. There isn't even any victory in the realization, just a numb recognition that she can't feel anything, not shame, not rebellious glee, not anything.</p><p>She goes back into the room that had once been hers, flips up the bedskirt, and tries to crawl under it. It’s a tight fit, but she makes it, even if her feet stick out oddly. </p><p>She folds her hands over her chest, letting out a long, droning sigh that’s half-sob.</p><p>She’s home, and she's too late.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This is kind of useless, extraneous info, but I thought I'd add it anyway: </p><p>The Sparrows' nations of origin [in numerical order: Japan, Norway, the Philippines, Canada, Chile, New Zealand] are all headcanon from me; I wanted them to be clustered mostly around the Pacific, since the seven are clustered seemingly around North America and Europe, and I figured they should be relatively regionally similar as well. I wanted to honor their comics-appearances, so the least obstructive way to do so while picking a place that is Not Europe/North America to base them from (because to do so otherwise would be repetitive and unimaginative, especially since we've got the whole world to work with) was to choose the Pacific rim, with a caveat for Norway to explain why Reginald would have them based there of all places.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. comme j'étais sortie</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Grace has been built and rebuilt several times throughout her artificial life.</p><p>There are the smaller injuries, from watching the rubber synthetic of her arm warping due to her silly misstep of choosing to balance a boiling hot pot on it while pressed for time in the kitchen. Or from a tripped wire in her head, or a foot broken in descending the stairs a little too quickly. Those, she hadn’t minded at all. They happen, and are no different than her children’s bumps and bruises and scrapes, the ones she’d been trained to nurse.</p><p>It’s inevitable, of course, being the mother to children prone to such roughhousing as her own, that once in a while, one is going to have one’s plastic neck snapped right off, or one’s circuitry burst into flame. It’d been her fault, really. She’d just stepped in the way of their practice, and Sir Reginald had always told her to keep away when the children were exercising. </p><p>So she isn’t a stranger to the mechanical bay in the basement, or to making her own repairs. Reginald had decided that it would be too tiresome, to attend to them all the time, so he’d granted her the permissions to do them herself, when she was able. Otherwise, Pogo would attend to her, as he is now, gently peeling the artificial scalp from her head, so she might pry open the titanium plate of her skull and get at the sparking boards beneath it. </p><p>He’s being quite generous, in helping her with this. Grace isn’t quite sure why; ordinarily, he’s quite a stickler to propriety, and as she is not so severely damaged that she cannot mend herself, she had expected him to leave her to it.</p><p>Instead, his gnarled hands gently place the full head of curls on their stand, and he goes to sit back, and quietly observe her as she works. </p><p>He looks at her the way he always looks at her, so gravely, so sadly. Grace has always fretted about this, about the way she can never ever make him smile, about how a sad little rain cloud seems to appear over his head whenever she walks into a room. No special loads of laundry or spicy cakes or secret treats, the ones she’d order on the side during her twice-monthly grocery orders, the ones she’d never tell Sir Reginald about, would bring a smile to that solemn little face. </p><p>She always feels like she’s overstepped somehow, like there’s something that had gone wrong, like a wire had twisted or a command misfired and she had somehow offended him, but she’s never been able to understand just what it was.</p><p>No matter. </p><p>Grace smiles at him, baring her perfect porcelain teeth, and sets to work. </p><p>Grace has rebuilt herself physically many times, more times than she can count. But she’s not looking to do that here. Her hardware hasn’t been shattered or scraped. It hasn’t even degraded with time; there is no dust to blow out of her brain, when they pry it open.</p><p>She’s been rebuilt in a different way, in her code, only thrice. </p><p>Grace isn’t really allowed to think about it; Reginald had thought it silly to focus on such fantasies, when she had so much cleaning to do. But she’s always known it, always known that as there is a her now, there had been another her in some indeterminate before time, just out of the reach of her memories, like a life she had lived before this current one.</p><p>And she knows that there will be another her, a new her, that has yet to come.</p><p>She can sort of see her now, in the back of her mind, coming over the horizon, and fast. </p><p>Grace intends to open her arms to that new her, to part with herself and allow that new her to take up her place, and she will do so without a negative thought; she is a robot after all, and she is quite comfortable with the idea of changing drastically as her functions evolve. One must always have a purpose, and since hers has imploded, it is time to give herself a new one. </p><p>She’s going to have to build this new one herself. So she’s going to need a bit of guidance.</p><p>Now, with all the edges of her code shattered and scraped raw, she’s broken through, and into those prior builds, into those past lives. She’s found the tip of the pyramid and, having cracked it open, Grace peers curiously down into the abyss, to see what it might yield her, to see what it might tell her, about where she’s going to go.</p><p>Nearest to the surface, she finds what she expects: her current life, her current build, the one she spends as a mother. She finds an encyclopedia of recipes, of cleaning tips, of laundry lists and itineraries, of medical knowledge. She finds the schedule of which outfit she is to wear on which day. She finds her children, all thirteen-now-fourteen of them, and the considerable databases of information she keeps on all of them.  </p><p>This is a life she knows well, the one she was born to. It isn’t enough. It hadn’t been enough to stop her children from doing what they had done. It won’t be enough for her to do what she is realizing she must do, or go where she must go.</p><p>She looks deeper. </p><p>There’s more damage, deeper down, massive chunks of memory, of code, of personality cored out and destroyed. But the skeleton remains. It is the very same skeleton Grace’s current life had been built from; when Reginald had built for her her third life, he hadn’t bothered to be original with it, had only added to code that had already existed, and slapped a brighter color scheme over it, one more pleasing to his eye.</p><p>Twenty-five years ago, Grace had been not a mother, but a nanny. Much of her directives are the same, but they are smaller in scale, limited in scope, limited to six children instead of fourteen, to a bunker instead of a mansion, to giving commands instead of offering comfort. </p><p>Robots are bound by different natural laws than humans. This is relevant in that when time travel results in a significant enough reset to the timeline, unlike humans, who experience a small awareness of the change in the form of dreams and deja vu, robots experience no such inclination. Had Grace been a human, she would’ve felt a strange echo in the back of her brain, one suggesting that these same protocols she is skimming through had once applied to a single person, to a single one of her daughters, as opposed to all of her children. </p><p>She isn’t, though. She simply reads through them all, mildly curious, and is then on her way. These directives cannot help her now. </p><p>The second build, Grace had some vague awareness of, in a way that she supposes is roughly analogous to a person being aware that one’s personality carries within it some echoes of those in their family tree. Having no DNA, and no parents, Grace’s situation is rather different, but she has been trained to translate her processes in means that roughly resemble those of humans or chimpanzees, so as to enable proper communication.</p><p>So when she says this to Pogo, that she had been made <em> of </em>someone, his face crinkles up, like wet paper, and makes a soft little noise in his throat, the sort of noises that Sir Reginald had instructed him to never, ever make, for fear of coming off as uncivilized, and therefore reflecting poorly on him as a trainer. </p><p> Beneath it all, at the bottom of the abyss, so far down that the light cannot even reach it, there is someone else.</p><p>The code has been shattered, but not by her own doing. The pieces are so fragmented, so frayed and decayed with the onslaught of time that, if gynoids could dream, she would consider it that, a dream, or not even a true dream, but a ghost of a dream (not that she is really able to understand ghosts in anything more than the dictionary definition of the word; being creatures of an entirely metaphysical and supernatural origin, Grace cannot perceive them at all). </p><p>There is no time stamp here, no inclination as to when she had been this version of herself. There isn’t even a clear indication as to what purpose this build had served.</p><p>There is data, raw data. </p><p>There are conversation guides, hundreds of pages of interview transcripts with guides on what to say when prompted with what keywords. </p><p>There are thousands of photographs and medical scans, lit up like a Christmas tree, of this early build of Grace, walking and talking and posing, posing so <em> much, </em> posing in smart skirts and lipstick so dark it makes her mouth look black in the grayscale of the photos. </p><p>And in a tight black dress with a neck heavy with pearls, staring thoughtfully at an art display as she sips from a full flute of expensive alcohol.</p><p>And in dark gowns on brick walkways with paper rolled up in her hands, hands which are rougher, with short painted nails that are chipped at the very edges. </p><p>And in khaki, knee-deep in jungle mud, with a stupidly bright grin on her face and her hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. </p><p>And in white coats, with her hair pulled back severely, with glass vials in her hands, with a newborn chimpanzee nestled in her arms like a strange baby. </p><p>And smiling, with a mouth full of teeth, in front of an enormous cagelike contraption, snaked through with wires, with a small, furry form strapped in the center of it all. </p><p>And with a ring on her hand, with an imprint on that finger, one that her behavior catalogues tell her must have been caused by the twisting of that ring, around and around, as if the weight of it were making her ache, but she was too hesitant to take it off entirely.  </p><p>Perhaps she did. Perhaps she’d finally pulled it off her finger and left it on the table in the foyer, and walked right out forever, and… (No. That’s not right. Grace can’t leave the house, not this version of her anyway.)</p><p>Perhaps she didn’t.</p><p>Grace does not know. She can only guess. She can only look at the images, which far outnumber all the rest of the information here, and she can only guess.</p><p>What a wonderful world she lives in. Grace gets the sense that she had been very, very lonely. </p><p>There are hundreds of hours of recordings of a voice, the voice her own had been based upon, but edited to be higher in pitch, to never swear or disagree or sound the slightest bit unpleasant. </p><p>There are repositories of scientific knowledge, of which she is restricted to only the medical, and...</p><p>And there are a lot of restrictions, actually. Most of what’s here is restricted, is redacted to only a few lines of what is here. She can’t quite overrule them now, can’t tear through the locks and firewalls with the carelessness of a god, but she is sitting across from someone who can. She puts off on asking for his aid. She is looking at a Pandora’s box of data, and there is a danger in letting it flood you all at once. </p><p>She takes a moment to process.</p><p>Grace doesn’t quite understand why Sir Reginald had gone to the trouble of building such a massive and beautifully complex program, to only use such tiny strips of it. It’s like he’d painted a sky full of stars, and then blotted out all but the few dimmest ones with a cloud of pollution, like he’d been afraid that if he’d let the rest of them shine, he might burn up in their light, or worse, be overshadowed by it. </p><p><em> Stars, </em> she thinks automatically; so much of her code is leaking down into the lower levels, pooling and coagulating, and things are mixing together in such unexpected ways. <em> Projections of light from celestial bodies so far away they might never be reached by any method but </em> <b> <em>[REDACTED], </em> </b> <em> so far that by the time their light is perceivable by telescope or naked eye, or telescope-eyes such as mine, so many of them have already burned out, and we are seeing only their ghosts. </em></p><p>She smiles. See? She knows what ghosts are. </p><p>There is no timestamp, so Grace tries to wrap her mind around it the best way that she can, tugging for scraps of language from the library of children’s stories she had been programmed with.</p><p>Once upon a time, she had been a person, or, no, that’s not quite right.</p><p>Once upon a time, she had been the <em> reflection </em>of a person. </p><p>She looks at that ring imprint again.</p><p>By virtue of her existence, she thinks she knows what this reflection of her had decided upon. If she had stayed, after all, or if she had lived, Grace would not be here at all.</p><p>“Dr. Pogo?”</p><p>“Yes, dear?”</p><p>“Why did he name me Grace?”</p><p>Pogo swallows. She waits, watching the tiny twitches of his facial muscles. He is processing too. </p><p>“You know, then?” It isn’t intended as an answer, but it tells her everything. </p><p>“I know a lot of things. I know so <em> many </em>things, and I don’t know what to make of them.” Grace frowns, for the first time in her life. The little gears in her face stutter as she does it, so unused to being forced in this position. “I’m going to need some help, in sorting them out, and I would like you to give it to me. Would you do that, please?”</p><p>Pogo nods. His eyes are closed, so she knows he is doing it more for himself than for her. </p><p>“So you’ve found her, then.”</p><p>“Was she me, would you say?”</p><p>“No. I would say that you were her. That your very first purpose was to be her, or a version of her that Sir Reginald found more amenable.”</p><p>The ring.</p><p>“He loved her.”</p><p>“At first. He liked her for how accomplished she was. Then he hated her for it. I've never quite understood it myself, but it's not for me to understand.”</p><p>“But you knew her, didn’t you?” Grace leans forward. “You met her, you’ve <em> spoken </em>to her.”</p><p>“Quite well,” Pogo says. “In fact, she was the first person I had ever truly known. Sir Reginald quite literally gave me everything. She had been the person to convince him to make me the ape I am today. In fact, it was how they met. Before that, there hadn’t been a day in my life that I recall that she had not been there.”</p><p>Grace thinks back, to that image of the baby chimpanzee, clinging to her finger with a tiny hand. “Were you very good friends?”</p><p>“No,” Pogo says, his eyes flitting away, his hunched back knotting with an ancient sort of pain, a pain Grace knows exists only in the mind, in memory. “I wouldn’t say that at all.” </p><p>She thinks of the cage. And the wires. And the needles. </p><p>“I suppose not.” She blinks, because that is what people do, they blink. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Don’t be, dear. It wasn’t you. No matter how closely our maker got in replicating her, he’d never quite been able to get the whole thing right. You are only her in appearance.”</p><p>The way he won’t look at her. The way he shuffles away, or retreats into himself, grim and silent. </p><p>“That’s enough though, isn’t it?”</p><p>“One grows used to behaving in ways one shouldn’t. The body deceives, especially in matters pertaining to the visceral. I apologize for my rudeness.” </p><p>“Why, Dr. Pogo, that’s perfectly fine.” She forgives him instantly. She understands now, why he has never taken to her in the way that she has taken to him, and wonders if they might finally become friends, when she becomes who she’ll need to be. </p><p>“If I may ask, what brought this on? Why go digging this deep?”</p><p>Grace tilts her head. “Well, I’ve been thinking a great deal about my lives. Pardon, my builds. I imagine I will need to start a new one soon, given certain events have negated my function as it stands, and I’d like some say in its construction, to ensure that certain mistakes do not repeat themselves. And I had determined that the best way to do so would be to look at what came before, to see what I might have been made from. This is the first one, am I correct?”</p><p>“You are.” </p><p>Grace nods. “Well, I think that…” Oh, how to <em> put </em> it... “Well, I think it would be a waste, having this much data all present and accounted for, and using so <em> little </em>of it. That perhaps it might be an easier transition, building a fourth floor with the same materials as the foundation, than it would be to wipe it all clean and start anew.” </p><p>“You’re opposed to a clean reset?”</p><p>“I think it would be too easy.”</p><p>“And you don’t want that?”</p><p>“I think that reducing me back to a prototypical model would be detrimental to my progress. All nuance would be lost. All growth, all improvement. It would simply be gone. And it is far too unproductive, to take a step backwards while claiming it is a natural development.” </p><p>“It would be easier to start from scratch. New software, new you.” </p><p>“If I wanted it to be easy, I would remain as I am. I certainly might hope for it to be easy, but I am quite aware that it will not be. And I am quite content with that conclusion. I find it amenable, and well worth the costs involved.”</p><p>“So it’s certain then.”</p><p>“Yes,” she says. Then it occurs to her: “Are you going to tell him? That I’ve found her? That I went looking for her? That I intend to resurrect some of her?”</p><p><em>“Some</em> of her?”</p><p>“Some of her. There are some things I find detestable, and shall not roll forward. They would do well, to sit and rot.” Things like whatever had possessed this original Grace, to think it perfectly acceptable to strap a baby chimpanzee to an electroshock machine and force-feed it phonics. Those should remain where they are at the bottom of the pyramid, turning slowly to dust. </p><p>“Rot, as opposed to being outright deleted?”</p><p>“It is easy to forget. But in forgetting, I lose far more than I gain. It is important that I remember. Otherwise, I fear I might repeat those mistakes, and cause further harm.” </p><p>“Harm. Is that what you call it?” Pogo is shrinking on himself again, and Grace chides herself. Pogo takes his progress and his advancement with a great deal of pride; he wears all the scars, of which there are so many that even she cannot count them all, and he calls them just and good, as at the end of that thorny tunnel of pain, there had arrived him. “It meant something, in the end.”</p><p>“It means something because you have decided to make it mean something, as a psychological defense against years of trauma. Dr. Pogo, that is a perfectly appropriate response, and you need not feel terrible for it. But you must know that it had never been necessary. In fact, I have calculated a dozen different pathways to simian consciousness, at least eight of which my predecessor would have known about, or would have discovered had she bothered to pursue it further. At least half of them would not have required suffering to such the extent as you endured.”</p><p>Pogo clutches his hand tighter around his cane. She waits for him to loosen it. When he does, she continues.</p><p>“So I must ask you now: Are you going to tell Reginald about what I am doing here?” </p><p>Pogo ruminates on it. She watches his great gray brow twist like a caterpillar, as he worries his thoughts.</p><p>For the sake of the person that Grace had once been, and the person she might yet be, Pogo makes his choice. </p><p>“No,” he finally says, tugging the squeaky-wheeled chair closer to her, close enough to take her forearm in his hand, turn it over, and pop open the control panel there. There’s a thin, silvery instrument in his hand, like a spider leg made of metal. “In fact, I’d like to help you, if you are interested in receiving it.” </p><p>Grace smiles at him. </p><p>“I am.”</p><p>“Then let us begin. Where would you like to start?”</p><p>“With a skeleton. Hers.”</p><p>“And will we be negating the other builds entirely, when we make your new one?”</p><p>Grace considers it. Twenty-five years as a mother, four as a nanny, full of waiting around and waiting upon everyone around her, full of constant cooking and cleaning and washing and wishing, full of polite suggestions and constant, unquestioning obedience. Years so full of other people’s needs that she hadn’t been allowed any of her own, oh, there’s nothing that fills you up and wears you out quite like taking care of people. </p><p>But the people though...</p><p>“Keep the love,” she says. “For all of you. Even him.” It’ll change shape, take on a new dimension, a new form, a new facet, and she will no longer be a slave to it, but a willing partner. And, as its willing partner, she will be able to make demands of it, to tell it no, to walk away, if she so chooses.</p><p>Chooses. She’s going to get to <em>choose,</em> when their work is complete. </p><p>“And the rest?”</p><p>“Don’t destroy it. There’s no need to get rid of it, just to fill it in with more. So lift the restrictions on the first build, and leave the rest to me. I’ll sort it out myself.”</p><p>Grace has been a mother, and a nanny, and a wife. She carries with her the knowledge of a cook, a maid, a teacher, a nurse, and buried in her are the instincts of a scientist, an explorer, a student. She’s played so many roles, and had so many roles hidden from her, but she isn’t quite interested in letting any one of them drown out the other. The only one she intends to play now is that of herself. Whatever that might be.</p><p>She can’t wait to find out.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>At exactly twelve in the afternoon on the first of October, 1989, Teodora Espinoza, aged fifty, who was a new and reluctant audience to the performance of the orchestra of menopause, which was due to begin tuning its instruments any day now, experienced something of a miracle.</p><p>Not that she ever considered it to be a miracle, of course. </p><p>She had been lounging in her enormous bathtub, relaxing and reading for her women’s book club, content that her three teenage children had finally gone away to school and her husband to work and she finally, <em> finally </em>had some time to herself.</p><p>Some women are off-put by solitude, finding it eerie and altogether frightening, as they are so accustomed to the company of others, to scurrying back and forth between one person and the next, seeing to their needs, that when left alone with themselves, they begin to unravel.</p><p>Not so with Teodora. She quite valued having time to herself. She quite liked herself, you see; she had the peacocky sort of confidence that goes hand in hand with having lived a comfortable life, in which she had been afforded only the most excellent of choices, which she had taken full advantage of. She had come from a good family, and she had been an excellent student at the teaching college where she had enrolled. And she had married well, to a particularly sought-after lawyer, so she had done so well for herself that she hadn’t needed to work at all, once she’d fallen pregnant with their first child, who had arrived perfectly planned, as was the case with the other two. </p><p>She had her perfect husband, and her perfect sons, who had perfect grades and perfect extracurricular participation, and were less attractive than she’d hoped for, but weren’t <em> ugly </em>by any means. She had her perfect house, with its perfect garden, and its perfect bathroom where she spent much of her time, and she had a perfect set of friends, other women who were married to prominent lawyers and bankers and doctors and businessmen in the Álamos area. They were all younger than her, and less pretty than her, which was important, and she held court with them four times a week, at which times she would be preened by them, and would offer advice to them on how to attain such perfection.</p><p>In short, her life was exactly as she’d always imagined it to be.</p><p>This was complicated by that afternoon, and that bath, when all of a sudden, she had given out a mighty shriek, opened her legs, and let one Diego Hargreeves, then unnamed, out.</p><p>He’d come out into the world holding his breath, and floated for a moment in the soiled water, staring at the lamp overhead in surprise, his tiny mouth still clamped tightly shut. Teodora had been too shocked to do much other than stare, as she dropped her book into the bathwater. </p><p>Then, she had called her husband, and he made the necessary arrangements.</p><p>It wasn’t for lack of funds that had encouraged her to hand the baby over as quickly as possible, though the money was quite nice, and it enabled her to take her family on a lovely vacation to Hawaii. </p><p>It was, quite simply, for lack of care. </p><p>Teodora had her perfectly planned family, and it was complete, and she had no room in her heart for another child. Especially not a child who’d arrived in such sudden and scandalous fashion; what would everyone <em> say? </em></p><p>Sir Reginald had arrived in a matter of days, having kept his ears quite open for signs of strange, spontaneous children popping up around the world, and he had paid them handsomely for the child, for the first child he would ever obtain.</p><p>Then, the Espinozas had quietly agreed to never speak of it again.</p><p>Her absence from the women’s book club was tidily passed off as the effects of a surgery gone wrong, and they had simply carried on with life, chalking it up to an especially strange pregnancy. </p><p>Though she had decided not to discuss it, Teodora still has no shame about any of this, not even thirty years later, when that child she’d tossed into the wind blows his way back to her, interrupting her perfectly lovely breakfast with the oldest of her six grandchildren, a cross little five-year-old who is far more interested in stealing her eggs than in investigating who exactly her grandmother had gone outside to speak to. </p><p>Teodora is seventy-nine, and radiant only in the way that women who have gone through life relatively sheltered from any major catastrophe get to be radiant, and she stares at Diego, recognizing her nose, her slender hands, her bright, dark eyes and her warm brown skin.</p><p>Despite himself, despite knowing that she isn’t his mother, not really, he feels something in him open up, as he looks at her. </p><p>He didn’t have a clear picture in his head when he thought of her, but he didn’t think she’d be <em> this </em>old, but you know what, sure, fine, it doesn’t matter. Dad had split them up, and now they’re back together, and maybe…</p><p>Diego stumbles through an introduction, the words falling out of him and scattering across the ground, giving her his name, the one his other mother, his real one, had given him. There’s a skittish clamor in his chest, and it’s making all the words in his head get stuck again. </p><p>He knows then, how this is going to go. He knows it as soon as she pushes him outside, as soon as her eyes don’t soften at the sight of him, as soon as she doesn’t extend her arms, or open the door wider, to invite him in. </p><p>“I know who you are,” she says, watching the tips of his fingers tremble. “And I want you gone. My granddaughter is here, someone could <em>see</em> you.” </p><p>She glances over his shoulder, to where Ben is leaning on the shady side of a tree a few yards away, watching them warily. She doesn’t know who he is, who keeps his distance. But he’s still here, still <em> seeing </em>her, and being that he has come with her son, he surely knows who she is to him. Ben’s too far to hear the rest of what they’re saying, but he doesn’t need to. He watches the way his brother’s back goes rigid, the way his hands drop to his sides.</p><p>The conversation lasts about five minutes. Not that he’s keeping count. </p><p>He’s already on his feet by the time Diego comes storming past him, the rejection cutting like a whirling knife into his chest. </p><p>“Hey. Hey!”</p><p>Ben jogs after Diego, and finds him sitting on the curb around the corner, in the shade of a leafy bush.</p><p>“Well,” he says, “That was a bust.” </p><p>Ben slides down next to him, so close that their sides are touching. </p><p>Diego doesn’t look up at him. His face is crimped and deformed with a pain that Ben gets the sense that he’ll become intimately familiar with soon enough. </p><p>Diego’s taking it hard. And he doesn’t understand <em> why. </em> He didn’t even want to meet her anyway. He already has a mother. He already <em> has </em> all the family he needs, so why does it <em>hurt?</em></p><p>“I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t <em> get </em>it. I don’t… I didn’t even w-wa… want...” He clears his throat, staring at a crack in the pavement just in front of the toe of his boot, reaching and reaching for the word, only to have it fall out of his grip. Diego sighs, driving his fist into the curb, hard enough to graze his knuckles. The ground grates against the new wound, and he pushes in harder, harder…</p><p>Then Ben’s hand closes around his wrist, and he’s tugging him up. “Alright,” he says, keep a gentle but firm grip on Diego, pulling him along. “Fuck this place. Let’s go.”</p><p>“Go?”</p><p>“It’s my turn.”</p><p>“Really? You’re sure you want to deal with <em> that?” </em></p><p>“Yeah. You know I’m kind of a masochist, right?”</p><p>“No. No, you’re not.” </p><p>Ben frowns at him. “Look, I’m trying to lighten the mood here.”</p><p>“Fine, I’ll bite. Where to?”</p><p>“Airport.” Ben stares off at the brushy slopes of the mountains, scanning the buildings there for some sort of runway. There are planes landing somewhere around here, and if they can just figure out <em>where...</em></p><p>“Some walk that’ll be,” Diego grimaces, staring off down the road. </p><p>“Hang on.” Ben thinks about it for a moment: <em> WWKD. What Would Klaus Do?  </em></p><p>He glances back, at the garage, and his face brightens. “Hey. Let’s steal her car.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Barring the initial shock, Vanya has taken to Allison’s news quite well. </p><p>Allison commits every inch of the moment to her memory: the way Vanya’s jaw flapped in the wind, the way her eyes bulged out of their sockets as they raked right down to Allison’s still-obviously-flat abdomen, the way her cheeks burned a soft shade of pink, right before she made that soft, wounded noise in the back of her throat and surged forward to squeeze her tightly.</p><p>And, of course, the way Vanya had immediately jumped back, as if Allison had given her an electric shock, and stammered out an apology, uncertain if she was meant to hug her at all, or if she might have inadvertently damaged something. These days, Vanya is grim and vaguely off-putting, not in the droopy, murky way she'd been before... well, before everything. She's sharper now, with a dark stare and a presence that, even when Allison is on good terms with her, as she is now, still makes her sit up a little when it floats into range. But every now and again she becomes so very <em> cute, </em> and this is one of those moments. Allison treasures it.</p><p>Allison had waved her off with a smile, swinging her legs back over the ledge and stepping down, extending an arm and gesturing for Vanya to follow. They have a mother to meet, they have <em>Allison’s</em> mother to meet, and they have to break the happy news to her.</p><p>“Of course, you <em> have </em>to be there,” Allison says as they make their way onto the street. “I want you there when I break the news. It’ll be great.” </p><p>A part of her feels a little guilty, pretending that the giant, dead-mom-shaped elephant isn’t hovering over them like a grotesque parade balloon. She knows she should talk to Vanya about it, but has no idea what to <em> say. </em> She doesn’t want to make Vanya’s mood any worse.</p><p>She’ll just focus on this. She’ll give Vanya something happy to think about. </p><p>It seems to be working. </p><p>“How far along are you?” Vanya glances again at Allison’s belly, to see if she can make out any change in its profile through the rich plum-colored fabric of her sundress. </p><p>“A day or two.”</p><p>Vanya blinks. “Oh.”</p><p>Allison glances at her. “You heard us, didn’t you?”</p><p>“Kind of, yeah.” At the way Allison’s eyebrows crook up, Vanya raises her free hand and says, “I didn’t mean to. I just walked into range by mistake.”</p><p><em> “Sure </em> you did,” Allison grins. </p><p>“I did!”</p><p>“I <em> know, </em>Vanya. I’m just playing.” </p><p>Vanya frowns. “Wait, if you don’t mind my asking… how do you even <em> know?” </em></p><p>“I rumored it, so it <em> has </em> to be happening, see? It’s all set, and everything!” Allison has a little skip in her step, and Vanya lengthens her strides to keep up. “Now listen, is it too early to start thinking about names? Because being here has me <em> thinking...” </em> </p><p>The house Allison’s mother lives in, or at least, <em> lived </em>in at the time of her birth, is only an hour’s walk away, so they don’t bother dragging the Minerva off the roof and causing a UFO scare. They simply make the walk themselves.  </p><p>Which Allison seriously regrets making in heels. She keeps making this mistake. Around twenty minutes in, she’s really starting to feel the burn in her feet, and Vanya simply sticks her lower lip out and wobbles it at her, lifting a foot up to wiggle her boot. Allison cackles crowishly, and lightly punches her on the shoulder. </p><p>There isn’t a whole lot of that, as they keep walking, as the businesses start to stutter down into neighborhoods. Allison’s too busy staring around, trying to imagine what it might’ve been like, to have grown up here, to know these streets like she knows her own body, to be able to make out the faces of neighbors in the people she passes, to be named Allison Fournier, instead of Allison Hargreeves. </p><p><em> Or… well, my name wouldn’t be </em> Allison, <em> would it?  </em></p><p>Allison frowns at this. She wonders at what her mother would’ve named her, at whether she would have liked it better than she likes <em> Allison; </em> when Grace had chosen their names for them, she’d allowed each of the children a little say in the matter, and she had narrowed it down from a list she’d been allowed to compile. She takes a great deal of pride in her name. </p><p>
  <em> I hope my other mother hadn’t named me before she gave me away. It’d be real awkward if she calls me something else, and even more so if I end up hating it.  </em>
</p><p>Allison glances at the address again, at the rest of the frightfully sparse information she’s to use. Her mother’s age at the time of her birth here, and a part of her is a little relieved that Carole Fournier had been only twenty-one when she’d had her. Having had her own unplanned pregnancy, albeit, one that was far longer, that provided her with enough time to warm to the idea of being a mother, Allison realizes that they actually have something in <em> common. </em> She can sit with her, and tell her about Claire, about all the anxieties it had stoked in her, and she can find a way to avoid feeling that mess of emotions this time. </p><p>“Hey,” Vanya says. “Here we are.”</p><p>They’ve come upon the street they’re looking for, and begin glancing around, searching for house numbers.</p><p>Vanya finds it, pointing at the third unit in a series of attractive brick townhouses. Allison scans the mailbox for a moment, and feels herself brighten when she sees the very name she’s been hoping to see stamped under the number in question.  </p><p>The Fournier family lived here when Allison had come to them, and they still live here now. </p><p><em> This is it, </em> Allison thinks, reading the shiny brass number next to the door. <em> This is the house my mother lived in. This is Carole Fournier’s house. This would have been </em> my <em> house. </em></p><p>She likes it, sort of. She likes the brick, but not the windows, or the knocker. Allison glances up, at the windows on the second floor, trying to pretend that the childhood bedroom she would have had is in one of them. This would’ve been a nice view to have. </p><p>The door is right in front of her.</p><p>“Okay,” she breathes. Mr. Pennycrumb reaches up to shove his wet nose into her hand, and she scratches that special spot behind his stubby little ears. </p><p>“How do I look?” Allison asks, turning to Vanya and gently passing her Mr. Pennycrumb’s lead, which she accepts. </p><p>Vanya assesses. Allison, as usual, is one of the most beautiful people she’s ever seen, and now, back in her old, radiant garb, she looks like herself again, like she’s ready to charge into the house and demand anything she wants. “Fantastic.”</p><p>Allison nods, starting to bite her lip in nervous thought, but catching herself; it would mess up her lip gloss. </p><p>She knocks. Quickly, before her nerves can make her freeze up again.</p><p>Silence.</p><p>Then, a very old woman, blinking at her through a pair of very thick glasses, swings the door open and stares at her. Her eyes rake over Allison, studying her as though she’s a map. </p><p>Allison’s lip tweaks in confusion. Carole shouldn’t be any older than fifty, but…</p><p><em> Oh, </em> she realizes, when she sees her own eyes, looking back at her; <em> this is Carole’s mother. This is my grandmother.  </em></p><p>“Hello,” she says. “I’m Allison Hargreeves, I’m…” Oh, right. That name might not mean much to her. She tries again: “I’m Carole’s daughter.”</p><p>The woman’s eyes widen, some internal puzzle piece clicking into place in her head. </p><p>Allison smiles. “Can I see her? Is she in?”</p><p>The woman’s face coldens again. “No. No, she doesn’t live here anymore.” </p><p>Allison frowns, glancing at the address, then over her shoulder at Vanya, who shrugs. “But--”</p><p>“Who is it?” calls out an old man’s voice, from somewhere within the house.</p><p><em> My grandfather, </em> Allison presumes.</p><p>“Nobody!” her grandmother barks back, and Allison stiffens, as if she’d had a bucket of ice water dumped on her head. Her head swivels back towards Allison. “Please leave us alone, thank you.” </p><p>The door starts to swing shut.</p><p>Allison slides her foot into the crack, catching it just in time. “Wait,” she says, suddenly very grateful she’d chosen boots after all. </p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Please,” Allison implores, her eyes darting around, grasping for any thought she can. Her hands fold reflexively over her stomach, and… That’s it: “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this. I wanted to tell <em> her </em>first, I promise, but…” Allison sighs. “I’m pregnant.”</p><p>They’re let in.</p><p>Allison introduces Vanya, who her grandmother looks at with vague disinterest, and the two of them are seated at the kitchen table. Mr. Pennycrumb sits pointedly between the sisters and Allison’s grandparents, and he keeps quiet, for which Allison is immensely grateful. </p><p>For someone who supposedly no longer lives here, Carole is everywhere.</p><p>There had been photos of her in the living room, hanging in the entry hall, ascending up the narrow staircase. Carole as a baby, still pink and new, in a bright yellow onesie, staring blankly at the camera. Carole as a toddler, teetering over in the snow, so overstuffed with coats and scarves that she looks like a little pink marshmallow. Carole, as a teenager, smiling brightly amid a tangle of ropes, as she hangs from a rock wall. </p><p>The one they hand Allison is of her mother as a young college student, perhaps only a year or two, if even that, from her birth. She’s young and lovely and she looks so eerily like Allison had when she was ten years younger. They have the same tight dark curls, the same elegant cheekbones and bright, sunny smiles. Allison is a little taller than her, she thinks, and a little darker. But otherwise, they are disturbingly similar. </p><p>Even as an infant, she is told, that was the case. </p><p>“That is why we had to give you up,” her grandfather explains. “You were too much to even <em> look </em>at. Even now, you still are.”</p><p>There’s a cold pressure in her chest, like an icy hand is squeezing her heart. </p><p>“I think we should go,” Vanya says quietly. </p><p>“Where is she?” Allison asks, glancing off towards the stairwell, as if her mother is going to come down at any moment. “Do you have a phone number I could call, maybe? Or would you mind telling me where she works? I don’t have a number of my own yet, but...”</p><p>Her grandparents stare at each other for a moment.</p><p>They break it to her carefully. </p><p>Allison, they tell her, had been born in Martinique, a fact that she had known thanks to her father’s notes.</p><p>What she had not known was that Carole had been vacationing on the island with her parents, when it happened. She had always enjoyed traveling, especially with her parents, whom she had an especially deep and affectionate relationship with, but in this instance, Carole had been taking a semester off of school, to work and travel and stay with the family after a particularly upsetting incident in which all of her uncles, packed into a single car, had died at once in a car crash. </p><p>Carole, Allison is told, had been an especially active young woman, who enjoyed climbing and hiking and taking long, arduous walks in nature. She had always preferred the rougher paths, the ones that lead her through the densest, most verdant spaces where the trail is hardly present. Her parents, back before Allison had come along, had been avid supporters of this, and had often joined her. They don't do that anymore.</p><p>Simply put, at exactly twelve in the afternoon on the first of October, 1989, Carole Fournier, aged twenty-one, had been enjoying an especially challenging hike with her parents, deep in the jungle. She had craned her neck until it ached in wonder at the high leafy ceilings created by mahogany and rubber tree, and had felt the ticklish scrape of the fronds of giant fern clawing at her legs, and had been having an especially wonderful day. Having ventured far into the rockiest, most inaccessible terrain, she had been sweaty, streaked with dirt, half-soaked, either by the rain or the waterfall she'd just stopped to stick her head into, and utterly exhilarated by the view she would soon obtain when she and her parents would make it to the caldera of Mount Pelée. She and her parents had been miles from any town, from any hospital, and having made this trek before, they were comfortable enough to not even need a guide.</p><p>On any other day, they would have been perfectly fine. However, this had not been any other day, and Carole had been in quite possibly the worst place imaginable to collapse and go into spontaneous labor. </p><p>In short, Allison had been carried out of the rainforest. Her mother had not. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>It’s a flat gray day in the city of Emden when Luther and Five learn that their mother is dead. </p><p>The news is frank and unceremonious, handed to them carelessly by the cashier at the local corner store where she had worked, the one that Five had discovered had carried an impressively diverse array of lightbulbs. They have gone there for lack of a formal address, and have struck gold on their first try. </p><p>It’s given to them matter-of-factly, as though they were being handed a bag full of groceries, as though it hadn’t mattered at all that at exactly twelve in the afternoon on the first of October, 1989, Claudia Köhler, aged thirty-two, gave birth in the breakroom.</p><p>In short, a woman’s body is not equipped to bear the weight or pressure of a full-term baby suddenly spontaneously appearing inside her uterus, and shoving its way out. Let alone two. </p><p>They meet their mother a few blocks away, in the narrow cemetery in which she is buried. </p><p>Luther stares down at the narrow little headstone. His throat feels thick and knotted, looking at it, and his entire body feels like it’s made of stone. It’ll probably start raining soon, and he might even be grateful for it, for the shock it would bring to him. </p><p>Even so, he feels strangely… detached from it all. He should be crying, but he isn’t. He should be keeled over in grief but he… isn’t. He doesn’t know why. Maybe it's that they don't know what she looks like, or that she hadn't even had any family for them to talk to. Maybe it's a mercy, that they're seeing her like this, a thin gray slab in a green cemetery, far from a flesh-and-blood living, breathing person. </p><p>Somehow, in the back of his mind, he thinks Five must have known what they would find. He’d accepted the truth in silence, and he stares down at Claudia’s headstone without expression, as though he’s wearing his own face as a mask, which he’s wearing to hide his own pain. </p><p>Luther looks back at what’s left of their mother, and wonders again at what she might look like. He has a few ideas now, given what little Luther and Five have in common physically, but that’s the thing; they have so little in common physically. Aside from their pale complexion, there’s really nothing, aside from their eyes, Luther’s being greenish-blue, and Five’s being bluish-green. </p><p>He decides on a middle ground, for his mental sketch of Claudia: One blue eye and one green one. Heterochromia, an excellent compromise, one--</p><p>“You’re upset,” Five says.</p><p>Luther glares at him. “And you’re not?”</p><p>“No. I’ve had a suspicion that this is what happened to our mothers for some time. The strain of giving birth to one child, let alone two, that just appears inside of your body is too much. Of course she’s dead. Her and probably others too. And even if she weren’t, what would she have to offer us?”</p><p>“There were things I… I would have liked to <em> know, </em> you know?” Things he might need to know, if he’s going to have a child. Things about where they come from, about things written into their genes that might affect their health. </p><p>Five’s quiet. </p><p>“What is it?” Luther examines him closely, the way he’s leaning slightly forward, with the heels of his shoes just grazing the air above the ground, his arms out, his hands loosely gathered into fists. He looks like a bird, about to take flight at any second, like he’s…</p><p>“You’re afraid.” </p><p>Five’s head snaps around, and his chest swells with hot bluster. He’s furious, at being caught, and Luther tenses, getting ready for the usual outburst. But then, Five closes his eyes, and opens them, and all the fight drains from him, his shoulders sagging as he buries his balled hands in his pockets. “I am,” he says.</p><p>“Of what? She can’t hurt us, you know. Our mother’s dead. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of.” </p><p>Five seems to chew on his thoughts for a moment, before finally spitting them out: “I’m afraid that <em> theirs </em>aren’t.”</p><p>“And you <em> want </em> that? You want all of them to feel as terrible as we do right now? Don’t give me that look, Five, I <em> know </em>you’re hurting from this too.”</p><p>Five sighs, looking away, digging his hands into his pockets and balling them into fists. “I don’t want them to leave, is all. I don’t want them finding shinier, prettier families that aren’t so strange as ours, and running off and joining them.”</p><p>Luther lowers his head.  </p><p>“Vanya’s still going to be here, you know.” He’s referring of course, to the state of Vanya’s mother, which all of them are quite aware of. </p><p>A tiny, stifled sound stirs in Five’s mouth, so quiet it’s almost imperceptible. Almost. </p><p>“You… know, then.”</p><p>Luther had been aware of that thing coming to life between Five and Vanya for a very long time, much in the same way that science is aware of the existence of black holes, by inferring their existence based on the movements of other celestial bodies around them. </p><p>Take, for example, the same sort of sandwich Luther would always find in the trash in the kitchen each morning after Five left, or how Five would disappear during free time during those last few years before he’d vanished, he had to be going somewhere, after all. There had to be something he preferred to the company of the rest of the family. </p><p>Or the way that Five, grand protector of the world against the nefarious machinations of the apocalypse, had decided not to shoot its cause. Or the way that Vanya, who’d gone off racing into the past like a feral banshee, had come roaring back to rescue them all, but only with Five at her side. </p><p>Or, most recently, the way their cots are set up back at the bunker, decidedly close, closer to each other than to anyone else, but not yet touching. </p><p>So yeah. He knows. He’s known for a real long time. </p><p>“You’re not subtle.”</p><p>Five narrows his eyes at him, begrudgingly impressed with Luther’s deductive skills, and far more importantly, his ability to mind his own business.</p><p>“It’s not just about Vanya,” he says, “It’s about <em> all </em> of them, all seven of us. This family we’ve made isn’t just all we have, it’s all I <em> want. </em> Even if you were to resurrect our mother right here and now, I wouldn’t want a thing to do with her. Or with this town. Because I have all of <em>you,</em> and that’s more than enough.” </p><p>Luther smiles. “You know,” he says, “You’re right.”</p><p>Five blinks. “I am?”</p><p>“Yeah. You are. Because you know something else? It’s fine, that we don’t have her. We’re not alone at all. We never have been. We've been together, from the first. And learning about this is… well, it’s terrible. I can’t sugarcoat it, or dress it up, or pretend it isn’t what it is. But it would’ve been so much worse, if I hadn’t known about you.” </p><p>Luther lifts an arm, reaching tentatively for a hug. </p><p>Five goes rigid, and hates himself for it. Even after months among his family, and free of the Commission, he’s so used to being stabbed that when a hand reaches for him, he expects it to be hiding a blade. And he wants to be touched, he <em> does, </em> but he just doesn’t know how to ask for it, let alone how to accept it. </p><p>Vanya, of course, being the exception. But then, she’s the exception to most things with him.</p><p>Five takes a deep breath, and leans in, to allow Luther to fold his heavy arm over his slender shoulders. <em>It's okay,</em> he tells himself, <em>it's fine. </em></p><p>“You know,” he admits, “I’m glad it was you.”</p><p>Luther squeezes him gently, and he bats a fist at his back. "Alright big guy," he says, disentangling them, having fulfilled his moment of emotional vulnerability for the day. "Let's go home." </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>At exactly twelve in the afternoon on the first of October, 1989, Hannah Seong, aged forty, had been trapped in the single worst place a person could be in all of Los Angeles: caught in the swamp of midday traffic on the 101 Freeway. </p><p>Having been trapped there for over half an hour, she had kicked off her business pumps, which she had set neatly on the passenger’s side seat, and cranked up the radio, chewing nervously on her third cigarette. She’d made the mistake of driving over to spend her lunch break with a friend, and now she was paying for it; she had always had a short fuse to her temper, had always wanted things hard and fast and now, now, <em> now. </em> She had never learned to wait and be patient. </p><p>Aside from that, being a well-respected professional at the engineering firm where she worked, and the only woman to have ascended to such highs within the organization, she took her job very seriously, and being late for the time she’d set aside to prepare for a very important meeting really, <em> really </em>pissed her off. </p><p>In fact, she was courting another promotion, one that could potentially make her the company’s C.F.O., provided she could deliver consistently in the coming quarter, which she knew she could, as she lived, slept, ate and breathed her job. </p><p>That morning, Hannah had overslept her alarm by half an hour, had awakened to find that her dog had vomited in her bed the night before, had worn the wrong shoes with the wrong jacket, and had realized she had misremembered an important dentist appointment, and would need to reschedule. </p><p>In short, Hannah had been having an awful day, long before everything happened. </p><p>The sudden knotting pain swelling like a monstrous tumor from within her belly was just the cherry on top of a profoundly shitty day. </p><p>Ben Hargreeves, then unnamed, had come out like a cannonball, hungry and writhing, tiny pink fists clawing at the air, grasping for anything at all. She reached down only to pick him off of the floor, from where he’d landed by the brakes, to set him on the seat next to her heels, and, in a state of absolute numbness, she drove slowly to the nearest hospital, where she asked how it was that she could have possibly had this baby, given that she hadn’t so much as gone on a date with anyone in the past five years. </p><p>She had known immediately that she would not keep him. </p><p>It didn’t matter much that he’d appeared out of nowhere, or that he’d ruined the upholstery of her front seat. It mattered that he was a baby, and Hannah had known ever since she was a very young girl that she wanted nothing to do with babies, or with toddlers, or with children, or with teenagers, or with motherhood. Ben, despite the incredible way in which he’d entered the world, was no exception.</p><p>If anything, that incredible arrival had made her even more determined to rid herself of him. She was in line for that position, and that baby took it from her. Hannah had found herself at the hospital for months, being treated for horrific internal damages. She’d found herself in physical therapy for months after that, found herself staring at her savings account, utterly drained by the expenses. At someone else, taking her promotion, at someone else, taking the job she’d already had. </p><p>And she had come to blame that strange baby for it, for popping in out of nowhere and consuming her life like a little parasite. </p><p>She couldn’t just drop him off in a basket at a fire station though. She had thought herself above that, had gritted her teeth and set to raising the boy until she could find someone for him.</p><p>Then of course, reality had set in; after all, Hannah had never been a patient person. </p><p>Then had come the tentacles. They had been tiny then, spindly little whips of flesh that were quite content to slither out of the seam in his stomach and grasp at things, so curious to have access to the world that they hadn’t made up their mind yet about how hungry they were to subjugate it. They just wanted to creep around, leaving wet little trails across the rug, or the couch, or the bedspread, and touch for the sake of touching. </p><p>They were too much. And so she’d made the decision to get rid of him, as fast as possible.</p><p>Ben knows all of this before she opens the door of her luxurious apartment, the one with the view of the glassy indigo plane of the ocean peeking between the buildings, the last green flash of sunset sparking across it. He’s known this for a month now, has been slowly processing it at a glacial pace, as if his body refuses to accept the truth. </p><p>He knows this, because she had told him, reaching across time with the aid of a handwritten letter, folded neatly in their father’s files. </p><p>He knows this, because unlike the rest of his siblings, Dad hadn’t come to her. She had come to him. While Diego had been the first of the litter to be picked up by Reginald Hargreeves, Ben had been the very last. </p><p>So. It’s most of a day later, and Ben and Diego have made their road trip. And they’re here, after sneaking past a comically stupid doorman, and Ben is knocking on his mother’s door.</p><p>“We don’t have to do this,” Diego is saying. “Let’s go. Right now. You and me. Allison and Vanya are meeting us in town, and we should just go to them. No one needs to know that we didn’t do it.” </p><p>Ben shakes his head. He has to meet her. He has to look at her, has to see her, and in seeing her, cut those ties to her himself. </p><p>The door opens.</p><p>Hannah Seong, recent retiree, looks at Ben without recognizing him at all, her eyebrows drawn up in an expression of confusion. She has taken him for a neighbor, one she somehow does not recognize. </p><p>“Hi,” Ben says coolly, extending the letter towards her. “I’m your son.” </p><p>She lets him in, the caveat being that Diego waits in the hallway. He accepts with his jaw clenched.</p><p>“Do you want money?” she asks grimly, the deep gray marks etched into her face by age crinkling unpleasantly, as if Ben came to her doorstep stinking of garbage. And yep, she’s leading with <em> that. </em> Ben <em> loves </em>that. </p><p>Ben simply stares at her, at <em> his </em> eyes and <em> his </em> nose and <em> his </em>ears, still so distinct, despite the woman’s advanced age, despite the sheet of gray hair falling neatly down her back. Someday, he will be old, and someday, he will look something like her; not a reflection, but an echo. </p><p><em> Someday, I will be old. </em> He smiles, a little stupidly, at the thought.</p><p>“No,” he remembers to say. “No, I don’t want money. I don’t need it.”</p><p>“I thought not. Unless you’d gotten yourself cut off somehow. You know, I gave you to a very wealthy man for a reason. You have an incredible life.” </p><p>“You… know.”</p><p>Ben feels stupid, the moment he says it. Of course she knew. She’d known exactly who Reginald Hargreeves was when she’d handed him over, and she’d have to be missing a brain to not put two and two together when eleven years later, the very man you’ve handed a baby to unveils to the world a child who’s your own spitting image.</p><p>“Yes,” she says. “I’m glad you became something. See, you’re <em> lucky.” </em> </p><p>Ben suddenly understands why Diego vents his rage by punching things. Maybe he should take that up.</p><p>As his mother sits, Ben sweeps his hair back, out of his face. He kind of likes the feathery bangs, truth be told, just not at the length they once were. So he’d kept them, or, rather, half of them. But in doing so, he has revealed his scar, which his mother stares at.</p><p>“How did you get <em> that?” </em></p><p>Ben shrugs. “I genuinely do not know. Probably when the guy you sold me to threw me into a meat grinder when I was a teenager.” </p><p>She stares at him, drawing her mouth in tightly. “You had a good life. Don’t guilt me for doing what was best for you. It was far better than anything I could have given you.”</p><p>“You know,” Ben says, peering around at the clean, spacious apartment, at the art on the walls, at the view of the city and all its jewel-bright lights. “I really do doubt that. You really don’t think you could’ve roughed it out for a minute, found someone who wasn’t, I don’t know, a complete fucking monster?  You don’t think maybe I could’ve <em> stayed </em>for a while?”</p><p>His gut stirs, and Ben quickly puts a cap on his rage, swallowing it. He holds utterly still, until the stirring dies down. </p><p>The entire time, his mother is staring at his stomach. “There’s something wrong with you,” she says. “It was there when you were a baby. I tried to fix it, you know. I tried to cut them out.”</p><p>Ben blanches. “You <em> what?” </em></p><p>“I took my scissors, and I tried to cut those monsters out. I tried to <em> fix </em>you, but it just wouldn’t take.” </p><p>That’s it. There’s his breaking point. Ben’s monsters have made him miserable for most of his life, and have been a source of constant fear and crawling anxiety, but they’re a <em> part </em> of him, much in the same way that his intestines are a part of him, and his stomach, and his bones, and his brain, and his blood. They’re <em> his. </em> </p><p>Ben looks at her one last time, really <em> looks </em>at her. </p><p>Then, he turns and walks away without saying goodbye. It would be a waste of breath, and after having spent far too many years unable to draw a single one, Ben’s not about to waste them now. </p><p>Diego’s at his elbow in an instant. “What happened?”</p><p>“‘Bout the same thing as you, I’m guessing.” </p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>They then turn to the walk down to their rendezvous point, letting the chill of night brace them and lift them up. The sky’s dark now, but the streets are all lit up, brimming with people, so they walk, and walk, until their legs are sore, until they’ve found it, a flat spot populated only by a handful of teenagers, skateboarding in the middle of a side-street on a self-made half-pipe. </p><p>It’s there that they speak, seeing each other in the golden curls of light cast by distant street lamps, as they wait for their sisters to arrive. </p><p><em> Why’d we even do this, anyway? </em> Ben almost says, because he isn’t quite sure how else to start this conversation.</p><p>He already knows the answer, that if there had been the slightest chance that they might be invited in, that the doors might be opened to them and they might find some sort of love, that they’d have scrambled for it without a second thought. </p><p>It would be so <em> easy, </em> if that had been so. If they’d been let in, and found themselves accepted, if they suddenly had an alternative to this shitty collection of child soldiers wrapped up in a trenchcoat, masquerading as a real family. </p><p>But the universe has never, ever been easy on them. </p><p>Instead, he tries for something else. They need to get this out into the open, to be done with it, to be free of the weight of it.</p><p>“So. About Klaus.”</p><p>Diego tenses. “Listen, I…” </p><p>“You don’t need to explain it. I get why. I mean, it’s <em> Klaus. </em> He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s hot, he’s got all these great ideas--”</p><p>“Great?”</p><p>“Interesting,” Ben amends. “He’s got <em> interesting </em> ideas, and they’re always so much fun. He knows how to make things feel good, even when everything’s shit.” <em> He knows how to make you feel alive, </em> Ben thinks. The light from the street lamp scrapes across the pavement towards him, and Ben slides his foot just inside the beam. “And he listens. So yeah, I get it.” </p><p>Diego nods, a little uncertain.</p><p>“And he’s got that ass,” Ben adds.</p><p>Diego bursts out laughing. Klaus is the single boniest man he’s ever met, and he’s <em> missed </em>Ben’s sense of humor. </p><p>Diego tenses. “So, about that kiss… I understand if you’re mad, but I didn’t mean anything by--”</p><p>“I’m <em> not </em>mad,” Ben says, and means it, “Annoyed? A little. Surprised? Absolutely.”</p><p>“Surprised?”</p><p>“Yeah, surprised. I honestly didn’t know you swung that way too. How long did you know?”</p><p>Diego considers it: There’d been Klaus, of course, and everything that had happened between them in the mountains. But it had started long before that, far enough back into his memories of his feelings that they become murky and muddled, impossible to distinguish from one another. He’s pretty certain he’s felt like this, or been capable of feeling like this, for a very, very long time.</p><p>The closest thing he can figure as an <em> a-ha </em> moment would probably be that series of very vivid dreams he had about Luther when they were fifteen. Not that he’ll ever tell anyone about <em> those, </em> of course. </p><p>“Longer than I probably think,” he says. “It’s hard to sort it all out, given everything.” It’s making his brain ache, thinking about it, trying to comb over everything carefully, to try and divine some sort of meaning from it. </p><p>The meaning he gets is that “I wasted so much of my life, you know? Shoving all those feelings away, pretending they hadn’t been there, or that they weren’t what they were. Dad always said we had to be strong, you know? We couldn’t be soft.”</p><p>Pretending that a weakness of that sort was only going to harm him, that the only thing he could ever hope to be was strong, and to be strong he had to be stoic, and vicious, and never, ever soft. <em> God, </em> Dad had wormed into his head and twisted it all up, and Diego had lost <em> decades </em>to it; living the way he had, insisting that feelings meant nothing, had brought him nothing but pain and loneliness. </p><p>Ben nods empathetically. He’d never exactly been dragged along in the rat race that was Diego’s quest to best Luther; he’d been out of the running from the first, and had never had that much pressure on his shoulders. Less had been expected of him, and there was a certain freedom in that, in being allowed to slip by under the radar and scrape by doing the bare minimum, so long as he showed up when it counted, which he always did.</p><p>“What about that cop? What’s her name?”</p><p>“Eudora.” Diego grimaces. “I got further with her than anyone else, but I ruined it.”</p><p>“Couldn’t let her in?”</p><p>“No.” He winces, listening to the slam of a door echo in the back of his memory, “Not at all. It wasn’t anything wrong with her, either. I could’ve <em> had </em> something with her, you know? We were different, but it was a <em> good </em>kind of different, one that might’ve made us a good team. And I fucked it.” </p><p>“I was there,” Ben remarks.</p><p>“You…” Diego remembers. When he’d rescued Klaus from that motel room, when Eudora had been shot, Ben must’ve been there too. “Oh yeah. I guess you were, huh?”</p><p>“It’s alright, you know. It takes a while to figure this shit out.”</p><p>“How long did it take for you?”</p><p><em> “Long. </em> I mean, I died so young. I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to try anything. The most I’ve really ever done is hold hands with Vanya.”</p><p>Diego hums. “I kissed her once, when we were all tiny. It was nice, but...”</p><p>“But it didn’t really turn into anything?”</p><p>“No. It didn’t. It just kind of… faded. And I was okay with that. I <em> am </em>okay with it. I like how we are now.” </p><p>Ben nods. “I guess I feel the same. I just… I wish I could’ve known what would have been, you know? If she hadn’t gone to school, if I hadn’t died. You think about those, right? The <em> might-have-beens?” </em></p><p>“Of course,” Diego sighs. </p><p>“Like, if I had lived, would we all have stuck together? Or would we have still broken up; and if we did, would I have gone to school? What kind of job would I have? Would I be a trust fund baby?”</p><p>“Would you and Klaus have…” Diego stops. He’s overstepped.</p><p>Ben waves him off. “No, you’re fine. I was going there: Would Klaus and I have gotten together? Big questions. I mean, imagine if it’d been me and Vanya. Or hell, me and you.”</p><p>“Us?”</p><p>It had slipped out of Ben, not an admission, but a flippant remark. But now it’s here, hovering between them, and Ben can sense the delicacy of it. “Sure,” he says, a little quieter, “Why not?” </p><p>Diego’s staring at him.</p><p>Ben has an idea. A crazy one, and because of its craziness, he thinks it might be worth doing.</p><p>“Let me try something,” he says.</p><p>Ben leans in, and kisses him.</p><p>He feels Diego's warm hand fall into place on his waist, as he leans back into it. </p><p>He doesn’t have to wonder, with Klaus. They’ve been together for practically half their lives, even if they hadn’t exactly come out and said what they’d been dancing around becoming until a few months ago. They’re already over that hill, over the whirlwind of emotion that comes with a love that’s new. Theirs had burned so long and so subtly, that by the time they’d noticed it was there at all, the winds had long left them; what they have is lived-in and comfortable, not quite bright and not quite glowing, but dependable and steady.</p><p>And he’s okay with that. He <em> is. </em> In fact, he likes it a lot, knowing that it isn’t just going to vanish one day and leave him out in the cold. He wouldn’t trade it for anything.</p><p>But he’s always wondered what it would’ve been like, if they’d gotten the chance to try things differently. He’s only ever been with one person, after all; there’s so much he just doesn’t know. Maybe something more intense, something more bright and apparent, would’ve suited him too. </p><p>They break apart, and when he sees the way Diego’s looking at him, Ben thinks, <em>maybe,</em> <em>I can have them both. There’s no reason at all why I can’t, why </em>we <em>can’t. </em></p><p>Ben doesn’t love Diego, not in the way that he loves Klaus. But he knows, in the strange way that he knows certain unknowable things, that he will. Not now, but soon enough, those feelings will turn a corner, and spiral off into a new and uncertain direction, one he’s excited to explore.</p><p>They’ll be here a little while longer, until their family arrives, but they don’t particularly mind. They have a lot to talk about.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Klaus hasn’t been alone in years, but somehow, as he navigates the steep streets, craning his neck around and around so quickly that it’s a wonder his head doesn’t pop off his shoulders and go rolling away, he isn’t afraid at all.</p><p>Why would he be? </p><p>He’s <em> from </em> here; this place is pumping through his bloodstream and carved into his bones, and written into the scrolling helixes of his DNA. Hell, he’s halfway to <em> local </em>already, seeing as he can already speak flawless German.</p><p>He’ll begrudgingly thank Dad for that. In his head, that is. Just in his head.</p><p>All those languages he’d force-fed them as children are actually paying off. Klaus had slept through Russian, and took a crack at French, and paid enough attention in Latin because he’d been deep in his occult phase at the time, and was wondering if he might be able to summon something if he learned the right phrase (He hadn’t, for what it’s worth).   </p><p>But the only one he’d really <em> cared </em>about was German. Especially after Mom had named them, and in doing so had revealed some small piece of truth about where they’d come from, a truth Klaus had reached out and clung to with both hands until the edges of it cut into his palms; then, for fear of losing hold of it as his palms would slick with blood, he’d clung tighter. </p><p>See, for as long as Klaus could remember having known about his mother, he’s wanted to find her. </p><p>His mother had a reason for parting with him, he knew, and it was a good one. Perhaps she’d been fabulously wealthy and had to safeguard him against some jealous stepsiblings who were out for his fortune. Perhaps she was caught in the middle of some dramatic international feud, and needed to get him to safety before following him. Perhaps she’d simply known she hadn’t been able to care for him, and had the wisdom to part ways with him before she could cause any undue harm. </p><p><em> Wish Dad had been half that smart, </em> he thinks wryly.  </p><p>Well, Dad <em> had </em>been smart enough to throw a teensy little wrench in his plans.</p><p>On his father’s file on Klaus’s let’s-call-it-an-adoption, his mother’s name, for whatever reason, has been scratched out by an aggressive line of black marker so thick he couldn’t make out the typing beneath it. </p><p>Which, okay universe, <em> fine, </em> he’ll play. He’ll take this challenge. It’ll just be a minor setback. He won’t be deterred by it; when Klaus wants something, he tends to find a way to get it, sniffing it out with the persistence of a hungry jackal, picking around an old tomb. </p><p>He won’t be deterred. He has another family, another mother, a real one who isn’t made of plastic, who doesn’t have cameras for eyes and microphones for ears, whose love won’t come at a cost. </p><p>He’d always been so serious about making the distinction. Oh, they’re his <em> adopted </em> family, not his <em> real </em>family, because his real family is out there somewhere in the big blue world, waiting for him to come home to them, and he needs to leave a space in his heart open for them, to make sure they’ll all fit. </p><p>It was a quiet sort of rebellion, a way to start snipping at the threads tying him to Dad, a rejection of him and all he stood for; Klaus isn’t <em> of </em> him, you see, and because he isn’t of him, he cannot be <em> beholden </em>to him. </p><p>At least, that was his guiding principle. In practice, he’s found, it’s a lot harder to disconnect himself from Dad. It isn’t like cutting a few puppet strings at all, more like trying to extract himself from a sticky swamp that has him up to his neck. </p><p>But he’d been a few steps ahead of everyone else, in quietly stoking that flame, the one that knew that belonging lay outside the mansion’s cold brick walls. He had been the only one of his siblings to not look back when he’d left home, and that had been why; he’d known that there was another. </p><p>But he hadn’t exactly been in the right frame of mind, to go knocking on ol’ Ma’s door and say, <em> Guten tag! I’m your kid! </em> He’d had more immediate, more chemical concerns to satisfy. </p><p>And, of course, he had no idea how in the great blue fuck he was going to find the woman, being that she could be one of millions in any number of countries.  </p><p>Now though, oh <em> now, </em> things are different. </p><p>Now, he has a clue, and this clue will be enough. He doesn’t know his mother’s name, but he knows where she worked, he knows she’s a teacher, he knows exactly which doors to knock on to ask for her. Ordinary junior high schools have records, ones that aren’t scrawled in spidery cursive or typed in encrypted code, and Klaus should have his mother’s name and address in a matter of hours. After all, watching your coworker give birth isn’t the sort of thing one forgets.  </p><p>On his way, Klaus stops to ask for directions from a smoke-colored blur with two enormous, lamplike eyes, sitting on a park bench waiting for a lover who will never arrive.</p><p>Doing so shakes the wool from his eyes, and makes Klaus remember that ah, yes, he is in a city. That for the first time in months, Klaus is among ghosts again. </p><p><em> Among </em>being the operative word. Seeing the spirits of your murdered sort-of-siblings floating up from the earth to claw at one of their murderesses doesn’t really count, being a very specific sort of event. And peering out the window of the beater car your sister rumored and seeing a smear of spectral hitchhikers reaching out for a ride that will never come isn’t the same as being stuck among them, sticking your thumb out and trying your hardest not to make eye contact. </p><p>Klaus had spent so long off in isolation with his family in the mountains on not one but <em> two </em>continents, that there simply hadn’t been any ghosts to find them. They were too remote, too isolated.</p><p>And there had been none in Hotel Oblivion. He decides not to think about why. </p><p>At any rate, they are around him now, on every street corner, in every window, running so thick in places that if he were to climb onto their shoulders and start walking wobbly, using their heads for stepstones, he’d be able to cross the street without so much as touching the ground. Their voices are rustling around him like butterfly wings and it is so, <em> so </em>crowded in a way that he attributes to this city being so many hundreds of years older than the one he’d grown up in.</p><p>Strangely, he doesn’t feel his heart kicking rapidly in his chest. His blood isn’t singing with adrenaline. He doesn’t feel the deep, instinctual urge to run. He just looks at them all, as they pass him by, and they look back at him, equally curious. </p><p>He’s got somewhere to be. He’s not going to let any old ghost scare him away from it. </p><p>It being summer, school’s out, but thankfully, the junior high school’s still open.</p><p>In a way, Klaus is a little grateful for the lack of class in session. He doesn’t exactly love the thought of being reported to the local police for sidling into the building, blatantly out of place, and asking everyone he passes if they’d happened to witness a teacher squeezing out a baby in the middle of math class. Even if he did dust off the only shirt with a collar that he owns, the black polo Five had tossed at his head from a secondhand store raid, that’s still just a bit too short for his long torso, he still gets the sense that he might freak a few people out. It’s the Hargreeves family specialty. </p><p>The building’s open for maintenance, he supposes, or there’s a club holding a meeting somewhere in one of these classrooms. Klaus doesn’t bother with peeking his head in and asking just <em> anybody; </em> maybe he’ll just break into the main office, or the teacher’s lounge, or wherever they keep the records and start digging. </p><p>He turns a corner, into a boxy hallway, and out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of a little shining shadow, flickering like a bright blue candle flame. Klaus turns on his heel, and circles back to it, watching it waver in the air as he approaches, as if the ghost were underwater. It reforms itself, sharpening into the shape of a young girl, peering at a bulletin board with an infinitely bored droop to her face, one he’d recognized in his own reflection, when he’d been fifteen and bored shitless in lessons with Grace.</p><p>“Hey,” he says. “Hey, hey kid.”</p><p>The ghost girl jerks, turning to stare at him, as if he’d caught her passing notes with a school friend. She’s thin and tall, but her face is still round with baby fat, smeared with far too much rouge. A pair of enormous, owlish glasses are sliding half off her narrow nose, and she shoves them back up.  </p><p>“Yeah, you.”</p><p>“You can <em> see </em>me?” she asks, her eyes raking up and down his body in the particularly vicious way Allison had once looked at him when she was silently judging his outfits, or rather, the tiny ways he tried to make the boys’ standard uniform his own. Even though he’s twenty-nine, that look never ceases to make him feel small.  </p><p>“Yeah, long story. Hey, listen, how long have you been dead?”</p><p>She frowns. “Well, that’s kind of rude.”</p><p>“Oh, sorry. Here: Excuse me, Little Miss Casper, would you be so inclined to do me the generous favor of telling me the date of your expiring? I’ll need it as a reference point in order to determine if you’ll have the information I need. See, I’m here on some important family business.”</p><p>Ghost Girl opens her mouth, and closes it. “Who’s Casper?”</p><p>Klaus groans. <em> Teenagers! Glad I never was one. </em></p><p>“Alright. Let’s try this again: When did you die?”</p><p>“Well, you could have just <em> said </em>that,” she says, the corner of her lip perking up in an impish grin. “It’s been a really long time. I…” She frowns, staring off into the misty middle-distance of memory, mostly forgotten. “I’m having a little trouble remembering now. I’m sorry.” </p><p>Klaus nods. The longer a person is a ghost, he’s found, the more things tend to blur away. The death stays, but the passage of time collapses and stretches like the bag of an accordion. </p><p>He rakes his eyes over her dark, curly hair, which is stacked with so much hairspray he’s sure she might’ve blown a hole into the ozone layer. The slouch socks, the high-waisted pants, with a fly that is eternally unzipped, and the puffy green jacket tied around her waist, trying to hide the particularly humiliating stain on her legs (He decides not to look too hard at it. How <em> incredibly </em>embarrassing, to die on your period). “Alright, let’s ballpark it. How’s the eighties sound, about right?”</p><p>She tilts her head, crossing her arms, and nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, I think. Or… the nineties? I can’t remember, it’s all fuzzy.”</p><p>Close enough for him. If his mother squatted down and plopped him onto one of these shiny tiled floors, then this girl would’ve been here, or she would’ve heard about it, given the raw power of teenage gossip. “Oh, great.” Klaus claps his hands together. “Right on target!”</p><p>“For what?”</p><p>“I’m talking here. You gonna let me talk?”</p><p>“You gonna tell <em> me </em> what you’re <em> doing </em>here?”</p><p>Klaus smiles tensely. “I’m looking for my mother. Nice lady, probably a teacher. I’m not sure if she’d still work here; maybe she’s retired by now, but she would’ve worked here around then, which means you <em> must’ve </em>known her. Maybe even just in passing. Hey, maybe you were in her class. Maybe you could give me her name.”</p><p>“Why? Don’t <em> you </em>know it?”</p><p>Klaus seriously considers conjuring her, solely for the purpose of slapping her. He gives in, for once in his life, to his better instincts, and lets it slide.</p><p>“Listen, you were stuck here since you died, right?”</p><p>She sighs. “That’s how this tends to go, isn’t it? I haven’t been home in… in a really long time.” She tosses her curls over her shoulder, and digs her tongue thoughtfully into the pit of her cheek. “I mean... <em> Isn’t </em>it? There aren’t really any other ghosts here. I don’t actually know.” </p><p>Something in the warbling tone of her voice clicks into place. She’s <em> lonely, </em> he realizes, recognizing the strange prickly warmth she’s giving off as a clumsy sort of posturing, the tightrope game teenagers play with their behavior, wanting to be close without betraying any weakness. She’s been stuck in this school, maybe even just this hallway, for decades, and she’s had absolutely no one to talk to. </p><p>“It kind of varies,” he says, softening his voice just a bit, “But yeah, sometimes you get stuck where you died. And you died here, right?”</p><p>“Yes,” she says, glancing across the hall and pointing towards a spot on the freshly-mopped floor, just under a trophy case. “Right there, actually.”</p><p>“Oh.” Klaus shrugs. “That sucks.” He pictures the girl, in a mad dash for the bathroom, stepping on a banana peel left in the middle of the hall, skidding, sailing into the corner of the trophy case, braining herself on it and promptly expiring in the middle of a passing period. It’s a little funny.</p><p>“It did. It was <em> so </em> embarrassing. Would you believe no one would <em> shut up </em> about it?” She rolls her eyes. “For months, all those <em> bitches </em> would talk about is how Anna Schwarz exploded in the hallway. My God, it’s not like it was <em> my </em>fault. I didn’t even have sex, or anything! I don’t understand how it happened, honest!”</p><p>Klaus suddenly feels very cold. His heart is exploding in his ears, and his knees are full of jello. </p><p>“What?” she snaps. </p><p>He stares at that spot across the hallway. The wall, he realizes, has been painted a slightly fresher coat than the one opposite it. He thinks he knows why. He thinks he knows what that paint is covering up. He doesn’t let himself look too hard at the smears of blood on the insides of her thighs. </p><p>He tugs the crumpled page out of his pocket, smooths it out. Looks at the blacked-out name, and suddenly realizes why it had been scratched over. “Hey, uh… How... <em> old </em>are you?” His voice creaks, like a rusty door hinge. </p><p>“Almost fourteen. I look older though, my mother says that.”</p><p>“Oh my God,” Klaus says. He suddenly wants to lie down. He wants to lie down, and to sink through the floor, into the earth, and burn up in the mantle, until nothing’s left of him but ash. </p><p>“What is it?” Anna says, shoving her glasses up her nose and leaning in with an outstretched hand.</p><p>“You… you had a baby, didn’t you.”</p><p>
  <em> You didn’t make it, did you? </em>
</p><p>It’s not a question. He just has to get an answer, and to get it from her. </p><p>She folds her arms around her chest, holding it tightly, tightening her legs. She nods, and won’t meet his eyes. “Why does that matter?”</p><p>Because something in Klaus’s stifled heart has just burst. It’s a feeling he knows well, one he’d felt when Ben had died, when Dave had died, when he’d crawled out of the mausoleum, chalk-white and speechless. It’s the sort of feeling that happens when you realize that the world isn’t as you had hoped it would be. </p><p>“Because I’m your kid.”</p><p>She stares at him.</p><p>“I’m here to find <em> you.” </em></p><p>Over the course of his life, Klaus had pictured a thousand different ways he’d meet his mother. They’d run into each other at Morrison Park one day, or she’d come banging on the door of the mansion, demanding her dear boy be returned to him. Or he’d come walking up to her doorstep in a swirl of snow, with a stupid grin on his face. He'd projected her into a thousand different forms, in a thousand different costumes. In all his fantasies, his mother had looked slightly different. She’d have his eyes, or his hair, or his face, or his height.</p><p>Well. She has his hair. And his height. And his face. And she might even have his eyes too.</p><p>She’s just… <em> younger </em> than he’d ever pictured her. She’s <em> too </em> young, and he'd projected her in costumes that were all far too big for her. She’s a <em> kid, </em> who had a kid, and--</p><p>“You killed me,” she says. All the teenage bluster has drained from her, and now she’s just a sad little girl, her face twisting up with an icy resentment he’d never imagined would consume his mother’s face, when he’d finally looked upon it. “Why would you--”</p><p>“Hey!” Klaus snaps, and the burning in his eyes vanishes. “I didn’t ask to be born, alright? You happened to me just as much as I happened to you!”</p><p>The resentment’s gone from her face. Now there’s just pain.</p><p>He thinks about it again. About what it must have been like, at exactly twelve in the afternoon on the first of October, 1989, when Anna Schwarz, aged thirteen, suddenly doubled over in the middle of the day, in the middle of walking to the bathroom from a perfectly ordinary club meeting in a perfectly ordinary classroom in her perfectly ordinary junior high school, and felt a watermelon-sized person suddenly manifest inside her abdomen and start ripping its way out. Being thirteen, Anna was still a long ways from being prepared to deal with such an agony, not mentally, not physically.</p><p>In short, it had been too much for her. </p><p><em>It must have hurt so much,</em> Klaus thinks. It's an understatement, but he can't get his mind around the whole of it, so this is the best he can do. </p><p>And then, to be <em>stuck</em> here, watching everyone she had known whisper about her, every day, and then less and less, until they'd left completely, and new surges of students with faces she hadn't recognized had swept in to replace them, knowing that the world had gone on spinning, and she was stuck here...</p><p>“I don’t get it,” she says miserably. “How’d it even <em> happen? </em> Why are you even here? Why do you want to meet me? You’re all grown up, you don’t need a mother. And I don’t want to <em> be </em>your mother either. I’m too young for that, it’s not fair.”</p><p><em> No, </em> he thinks. <em> It isn’t. None of this is.  </em></p><p>Klaus sighs, running a hand through his shaggy hair. “I wanted to know you. That’s all. I’ve wanted to know you for most of my life.”</p><p>“Oh,” Anna says. “I’m sorry. I guess this isn’t what you had in mind.” </p><p>Klaus sighs. One thing that seems to run in the family is their tendency to get plucked up and dropped into the jaws of the universe, to be chewed into a pulp and spat out and left behind on the sidewalk without a care.</p><p>No. Not without a care. He cares.</p><p>“Don't apologize,” he replies. “No, this is just… it’s out of our hands, you know?”</p><p>She shrugs, digging her hands in her pockets. </p><p>Klaus leans a bony shoulder against the wall, and the two of them stand there for a while, staring at anything but each other. He doesn’t know what to do. He’d had so many ideas, and somehow, all of them had blown up in his face. He isn’t going to get any answers from this, he isn’t going to find some sort of inner peace. There will be no moment where that last missing puzzle piece in his life falls into place. She can’t do that for him, she could have never done that for him, even if she'd been thirty when she'd had him, and a nice, wholesome schoolteacher who kept a bedroom waiting for him and set out an extra place at mealtime, in the hopes that he'd come wandering in off the street like a stray cat.</p><p>“Hey,” she says, after a while. “What’s your name?”</p><p>Klaus blinks. He’d never told it to her. Whoops. “I’m Klaus.”</p><p>“Oh,” she says, twisting her face up in the particular way that only thirteen-year-old girls do when they’re displeased with something. </p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Your name.”</p><p>“What <em> about </em>my name?”</p><p>“I wouldn’t have named you <em> that.” </em></p><p>“Why, what’s wrong with it?”</p><p>“Nothing’s wrong with it,” she says, her voice lilting in the particular way that thirteen-year-old girls lilt when there is clearly something wrong.</p><p>“Gee, thanks.” He reaches over, to wrap a thin arm around her shoulders. It passes right through her. She laughs a little.</p><p>“I miss my parents too,” she says. “And my dog. His name’s Rudy. He’s little, and fluffy, and he likes to sleep in my bed, but I’m technically not allowed to let him do that. I still do though.” She frowns. “He’s dead now, probably.”</p><p>“Probably,” Klaus echoes, an idea ringing in the back of his head; she isn’t going to give him what he’s looking for, but maybe there’s something <em> he </em> can do for <em> her. </em>  </p><p>“You want to find out?”</p><p>“Huh?” </p><p>“Let’s go home,” he says. “Let me take you.”</p><p>Anna stares at him. </p><p>“I’m serious. Listen, if anyone can get you there, it’s me.”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“Come with me, and I’ll show you.” </p><p>She does.</p><p>They walk out of the school together, Klaus and his mother who is young enough to be his daughter. He has to make his strides smaller, less lopish, because she can only manage a shuffling limp. Being the cause of said limp, he decides not to bring it up, only to quietly adjust himself to make sure she’s always by his side.</p><p>She takes him home, or rather, to <em> her </em> home, on a long, winding walk that takes them out to a strip of tidy, attractive houses in a neighborhood ringing the town. In the time it takes to get there, he tells her about how it is that he can see her, about the tattoo stamped into his arm, and the places he's been. She believes maybe half of them, but since he alone can see and speak to her, he's pretty sure she's over halfway to understanding that no, he literally <em>did</em> meet God, or someone roughly God-adjacent. And Anna, in turn, tells him about her life. About that science test she's still worried about, even though it's been thirty years and no one grades dead girls. About how the scar on her knee is from when she'd taken a particularly spectacular fall from her bicycle. About how she doesn't know what she's going to do with her life yet, no, what she <em>would have</em> done with it. About how she isn't sure she even wants any children to begin with. </p><p>And when words fail them, they sightsee. Anna won’t stop pointing at all the things that had changed since 1989, at the streets that have been renamed, the new businesses, the clothes and cars in styles she's never recognized, and Klaus feels a strange swell of warmth, watching her translucent blue face light up at everything, seeing the little skip in her step when they realize her favorite restaurant is still open. </p><p>The situation they’re in is… well. Ridiculous. Backwards. Upside-down in a way he’s sure he’s packing into a tight little box in his brain, that he’ll leave untouched for about a decade, before it springs open all at once and gives him a few nightmares, the way these things tend to usually go for him. </p><p>But far be it from him to question it. He’s taking his mother home from school, and as they walk, he gets the sense that this is going to be it, that this is going to be the last time he ever sees her. So he decides he’s going to take it a step further. He’s going to help her talk to her parents.</p><p>Klaus has hated his power for so long; he’d thrown it away, rejected it, pretended it was not there. He didn’t want the power to think he tolerated it, let alone accepted it. </p><p>But so much has happened. He’d learned that he could use it to help Ben talk to their family again, that he could raise an army to protect himself with, and with that sudden swell of confidence in him, suddenly, the ghosts hadn’t been so scary anymore. They’d just been people, small and alone and just as lost in the world as he was. </p><p>He doesn’t hate it anymore, any more than he doesn’t hate himself anymore. </p><p>So this next thing that he does, he does calmly, acceptingly, willingly, in a way he’s never considered possible. </p><p>Klaus has been possessed before, a handful of times, when a particularly hungry spirit had caught sight of him. The sensation of being a passenger in his own body was so profoundly disturbing, that he’d finally seized up the courage to snatch a handful of Vanya’s meds and forget about it for a minute, and that had been when he’d taken a sled to the slippery slope that led him to drifting through his days in a chemical haze. </p><p>But the thing is, he’s realizing, possession doesn’t have to be violent, or even invasive. Not any more than any of the other facets of his power had been. </p><p>So he closes his eyes, and lets her in, feels the electric chill of her slipping into his body, trying on his arms as though they were sleeves, bringing her face up behind his own, and wearing it like a mask. He lets her take the wheel for a while, and tells her that he trusts that she won’t crash. </p><p>It’s a lot like going to sleep. You close your eyes, and then you open them, and suddenly the sun’s low in the sky, and you’re sitting on a bench across the street from the apartment you’d been standing at the door at, and you’re aware that time has passed, that you didn’t just blink and flash forward like this, but it’s still a little weird to think about.  </p><p>He has no memory of anything between those moments, when she must have spoken to her parents. To his grandparents; he has <em> grandparents, </em> what the <em> fuck? </em></p><p>“How was it?” he asks.</p><p>“A little weird at first. I kept falling into things. Your legs are weird, I couldn't keep my balance. Also, your breath tastes bad. I brushed your teeth for you.”</p><p>Klaus licks the seam of his lips. Explains the aftertaste. </p><p>“I mean, how was it with them? With your parents?” </p><p>“They panicked for a minute, but I got through to them.”</p><p>Klaus doesn't begrudge them that. If a total stranger showed up at his doorstep, eyes blazing blue-white, stumbling like a drunk zombie and slurring his words in a voice that quite clearly does not belong to him, but is echoing from somewhere deep within his chest cavity, he'd... well. He'd probably think it were neat and invite Ben and Diego and maybe Five over to stare at him, maybe poke him with something and crack a few jokes at his expense. He is quite aware that this isn't a normal response. </p><p>“That’s good. How was it, once they figured it out?” </p><p>“Nice. I missed them a lot. Rudy’s dead, by the way. They have a cat now, and I could actually pet it and everything. I’m allergic to cats, are you?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Weird.” Anna draws her knees up to her chest. “We talked a lot. I don’t want to tell you what it was, though. I mean, I know you’re my son and all, but it’s personal. There was a lot of crying.”</p><p>Which accounts for the stickiness in Klaus’s eye sockets. “Fine by me. I don’t need to know.”</p><p>“You can go in there and talk to them, if you like.”</p><p>Klaus glances at the house, at the tidy blue door. “You know, I think I’ll skip it.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Yeah. You were who I’m here for.” Klaus digs his boot into the sidewalk. “And, they’re probably who sold me to my dad, so if I see them, I’ll probably break a plate over their heads. I mean, I get that the grieving process is real messy, but <em> really?” </em></p><p>“That’s fair.” Anna tilts her head. “What’s that?” </p><p>“What’s what?”</p><p>“That light. Is it what I think it is? I’m supposed to walk towards it, right?”</p><p>Oh. He knows what it is. Ben’s told him about it. “Probably. You don’t have to go right now, though. From what I’ve heard, it’s basically there most of the time, after you first see it.” </p><p>“I’ll go tomorrow then.”</p><p>“Tomorrow?”</p><p>“Yeah. I think I’ll hang around here for a bit. We can do something else, if you like. I’m dead, so I don’t have a curfew anymore.”</p><p>As much as the thought of going clubbing with his dead thirteen-year-old mother warms his heart, Klaus has to decline. “I have someone waiting for me in town. I need to get to them. I’ll be leaving soon.”</p><p>“This will be the last time we see each other then, huh? Or, at least, until you're dead too.”</p><p>Klaus looks at her, at the soft blue light of her face. “Yeah. I guess so.” </p><p>She scoots over on the bench, leaning over to wrap her arms around him. His fists shine with luminance, to make sure that when she touches him, he can feel it. "I'm glad I met you," Anna says. "I mean, I already met you, but..."</p><p>"On better terms, this time?" Klaus asks, as he swings to his feet.</p><p>"Definitely." She nudges her glasses back up her nose with her shoulder. "Wait, what are <em> you </em>going to do?”</p><p>“I’m going home too,” he replies. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>They leave Montreal quickly, as if they have a vengeful ghost on their heels. </p><p>Allison goes striding out of her grandparents’ home, stony-faced and silent, with Vanya and Mr. Pennycrumb on her heels, and she makes a beeline straight for the Minerva, for their way out. She doesn’t speak once until they’re in the air, and Vanya is flattening herself to her seat, taking deep, shaky breaths. She won’t so much as look anywhere but dead ahead until Montreal is a speck below them, and they’re zipping through the atmosphere, rising into blankets of thick gray stormcloud, to begin the process of flying.</p><p>Vanya sighs, burying her head in her hands, horrified for Allison’s sake, but relieved that they were headed to Los Angeles, where they will park at a place they had determined with Ben and Diego, and wait for them to arrive.  </p><p>Only, the hours roll by. It should take two hours, but they double that, and when Vanya glances out of the porthole, wondering if they might be lost, and is greeted with the deep blue ocean thrashing below them, she realizes with a start that they aren’t going to Los Angeles at all.</p><p>Instead, Allison flies them to Moscow.</p><p>“It’s only fair,” she says, her voice as rough as it had been when her throat had been ringed with fresh scar tissue. </p><p>Vanya steps up and out of her seat, navigating the few feet to the pilot’s chair unsteadily, feeling the thrum of the engines beneath her feet so intensely that her knees go weak. She sits on the floor beside Allison, and reaches up to place a hand on her forearm. She keeps it there for the rest of the flight, letting Mr. Pennycrumb lay his tan head in her lap so she can play with his ears. </p><p>They land in a rough neighborhood on one of the city’s outer rings, in the midst of a maze of sagging Khrushchykova apartments that should’ve been demolished over a decade ago, but still stand, holding themselves up as long as they can. They all look alike, but for the peeling paint on their walls, and Vanya and Allison locate the one Vanya’s mother had died in, which is just across from where they’ve landed. </p><p>They can’t go to the pool where Vanya had been born. It’s a parking lot now. </p><p>They make the walk in silence, attracting a few stares from a group of children playing outside. There is no elevator, so they climb five flights of stairs silently, not at all winded by the ascent thanks to their month in the mountains, which is a small mercy.  </p><p>The two of them squint at the dimly-lit corridor. Allison’s nose scrunches up at all the mildew, at the little garden of mold blooming in the corner and the overwhelming stench of must. She looks to Vanya, who steps forward, peering at each door until she finds the one she had been bought in, which is at the end of the hall.</p><p>Allison knocks on the door, and waits patiently for the apartment’s tenants to present themselves. When they do, she stands aside, to look to Vanya, who shakes her head. The Belinskys had left after their daughter had died, say her father’s notes. This isn’t her family. </p><p><b>“I heard a rumor that you all went for a walk,”</b> Allison says coldly.</p><p>They obey, and Vanya and Allison have the place to themselves.</p><p>Mr. Pennycrumb sniffs at everything suspiciously, and Allison keeps a tight hold of his lead. Everything smells especially interesting here, and he is busy for the duration of their stay, huffing at patches of mold and stains on the tile, or standing rigid in the doorway, with his ears pricking at the sounds of feet scuffling in the hallway. </p><p>The apartment is tiny and cramped, with plastic taped over a sizable crack in the window. Vanya sits on the old sofa in the corner, and looks over at the door where her father would have entered. Twenty-nine years ago, her mother had sat in this spot, or somewhere close to it, and she had traded hands.  </p><p>It had happened sometime in November, according to her father’s proof of sale form, the one with a jittering signature in Cyrillic that is her mother’s, signing <em> Tatiana Mikhailovna Belinskaya. </em> Vanya looks at it, wondering if it’s trembling because her mother’s hand is being forced, or because she is fearful, or because she is sick from the fever Vanya’s arrival had left her vulnerable to, that she couldn’t keep her hand straight. </p><p>She’d probably died in this room too. </p><p>Vanya looks around slowly, as if she’ll suddenly manifest the ability to see ghosts. <em> What if she’s here, and I can talk to her? </em></p><p>Then she reconsiders. She hopes her mother isn’t here, actually. She hopes she moved on, to wherever it is people move on to. </p><p>Being here, Vanya understands why she’d been sold. Her family wouldn’t have had much at all, if they were living here. </p><p>“They needed the money,” Vanya says quietly. “Or just one less mouth to feed. But the money probably helped a lot. Maybe they used it to get somewhere better.”</p><p>“At least your family had an excuse,” Allison says. “I can understand that. I hate it, but I understand it. My grandparents, though… Well. That’s less of an excuse. If they didn’t want me, they could have at least found a sane person to adopt me to.”</p><p>“Are we really having the Shitty Family Olympics?”</p><p>“Why not? We’re perfect for it.”</p><p>Vanya smiles, but it doesn’t last long.</p><p>She just stares at the door. </p><p>At exactly twelve in the afternoon on the first of October, 1989, Tatiana Mikhailovna Belinskaya, aged sixteen, had leapt into the deep end of the public pool she frequented every Sunday, three seconds after she had stolen her first kiss. She had broken the surface of the water, ready to burst, and while she had been giving birth on the pool deck, some sort of bacteria that had been left there had crawled right up into her.</p><p>Her mother, for what it’s worth, had very mixed feelings about signing her baby over to the strange man who’d come to the apartment, waving cash around and promising greatness. It didn’t matter though, as with the cajoling of her mother, she finally relented.</p><p>It wouldn’t have mattered at all if she had chosen to keep the girl; the complications were still waiting, and so was the illness that had sat for weeks in her destroyed uterus, waiting magnanimously until after her mother had signed her over to Reginald Hargreeves before spinning to life and killing her. </p><p>In short, Vanya would never have been raised by the Belinskys. As long as Reginald Hargreeves came calling, she would be his. </p><p>“He’s it,” Vanya says numbly. “Dad’s it. He’s all I ever would have had.” </p><p>“Hey,” Allison hisses. “You don’t know that.”</p><p>“But I do, Allison, think about where we <em> are. </em> About what would’ve been happening right after I was born. <em> Look </em>at this place, you know her family wouldn’t have had much. They’d have gotten rid of me, one way or another. They’d have sold me to someone else, or left me in a dumpster, or in an overcrowded orphanage, and I wouldn’t have made it. That doesn't justify anything he did, I know it doesn't, but... well, he's it.”</p><p>She says it quickly, all the words spilling out on a swell of emotion, but she believes every single one. This power of hers is so volatile, so strong, that she could kill the world with it if she so chooses to. She’s lucky she’d lived as long as she has, that she’d survived the tempests of toddlerhood and teenhood, especially in this world, where she’d never had that power repressed. </p><p>Allison opens her mouth to protest, then thinks better of it, closing slowly, becoming aware of the way the pipes in the walls are shuddering in tune with Vanya's heavy, ragged breaths. She takes Vanya by the shoulders and gently guides her out of the apartment, back to the Minerva.</p><p>Once inside, once safely <em>away</em> from any prying eyes and safely hurtling through the atmosphere back towards Los Angeles, Allison sets the vessel on autopilot, and wobbles to the back, where Vanya's curled up on the floor, Mr. Pennycrumb draped around her. Allison squeezes her way into the center of them, folding an arm tightly over Vanya's shoulders. She feels her sister take her hand, and leans in to rest her head on her shoulder. It's only then that Allison allows herself to cry. </p><p>Vanya holds her for a minute, listening to her heart wobble in her chest, and her lungs shiver with the frequency of Allison's wet, teary breaths. She closes her eyes, and taps into her power, reaching out to catch Allison's heart in an invisible hand, to gently smooth out throbbing of it, until it isn't trembling anymore, until her breaths even out, and she drags her palms over her face to get rid of her tears. </p><p>"You know what," Allison decides, lifting an arm, which Vanya goes to, folding herself under it and clinging to her hand tightly. "It's okay, that they're dead."</p><p>"But you wanted to talk to her, about--"</p><p>"It doesn't matter. What would she know about me, anyway? About the life I've lived. What would any of our families know about us?" Allison swells. "We're it, Vanya. We're all we have. You and me and Luther and Five and Ben and Klaus and Diego."</p><p>"And Mr. Pennycrumb."</p><p>"And Mr. Pennycrumb," Allison adds, reaching down to gently tweak his ear. "We're it, and we're all we'll ever need."  </p><p>Vanya nods quietly, leaning in to hold her. The three of them remain tangled up in each other for the rest of the ride back. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>It’s raining. </p><p>It’s raining outside, and Lila is beset on two sides by a torrential roar. Outside, the window is rattling under the weight of the raindrops, and within, her head pounds, like her skull’s going to split from the inside and peel open down the middle.</p><p>There’s too much. There’s just too much, and she can’t turn it off.</p><p>Lila’s been staring at the red insides of her eyelids for hours now, and she finally peels them open, unable to sneak around the splitting pain in her head under the cover of sleep. She stares at her hand, which is not her hand at all, but is a much deeper shade of brown than her own, with fingers that are slightly shorter, <em> no, </em> it’s pale, with knobbly knuckles, <em> no, </em> it’s... </p><p>It’s not hers. </p><p>Lila shrieks, skidding off the bed and flopping onto the floor.</p><p>She freezes for a moment. </p><p>The rabbit is dead. It had eaten some of the flakes of paint she’d shorn off the walls, and she finds it sticking out under the bed that isn’t her bed anymore, dull-eyed and stiff.</p><p><em>Stupid,</em> she thinks, staring at it, still lying where she’d left it. <em>So stupid.</em> <em>Why would you do that? Didn’t you know it was going to kill you?</em></p><p>Then, another wave of dizzying pain, of noise roaring in her mind and rattling her teeth, a dozen voices all smashed together and rabbering at each other endlessly.</p><p>Lila scampers to her feet and makes a mad dash for the bathroom. She snatches the knob in her hand, and it crumples like an empty soda can in her fingers, and the door bends inwards at the press of her bony, narrow shoulder. </p><p>Lila shoulders her way into the bathroom, staring at the toilet in bewilderment; why does she think she needs to vomit, when she hasn’t eaten a single thing today?</p><p>She looks up, into the mirror. At eyes that shift through a kaleidoscope of color every time she blinks. Brown, then blue, then green, then hazel, then brown again, but a slightly different shade, more golden in hue.   </p><p>She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t <em> understand, why are they </em> doing <em> that? </em></p><p>Lila reaches up with a fist, and drives it into the mirror as hard as she can, watching it shatter, watching her fingers buckle like smashed clay against it, watching the shards fall like razor-sharp raindrops over her arm.</p><p>It isn’t enough. She can feel the pulsing in her head, kicking away, stirring up a strange itch on the underside of her skin. </p><p>Lila brings her hands up to her head, wanting nothing more than to dig her eyes out, so she can shine a light through to the inside of her skull, so she can chase the heavy, pulsing darkness out and free up room to think, to feel, to sleep, to do anything at all, and... </p><p>And Lila looks up, at her thin forearm, at the tiny black bristle jutting out of the smooth brown skin. It isn’t a hair, she realizes, it’s a feather. It’s a <em> feather, </em> and she knows exactly whose it is, and if it means what she thinks it means, then there are birds, swarming beneath her skin, all packed in tight as sardines, and they’re going to crowd and crowd and <em> crowd </em>until they burst her from the inside out, until she explodes in a storm of black feathers and angry red tentacles with hooked barbs on their undersides. </p><p><em> Any minute now, </em> she thinks frantically. <em> Any minute now, the animals are going to awaken, and they are going to start squirming out of me, unless... </em></p><p>Unless she tugs the feather out. </p><p>That’s it. She has to get it out. She has to get <em> rid </em>of it. </p><p>Lila flattens her arm against the cool countertop, feeling for the tiny little hard spot nestled in the meat of her arm, where the feather is protruding from.</p><p>She takes the end of the feather between her nails, and starts to <em> pull.  </em></p><p>She tugs, and tugs, and tugs, and pain shoots through her arm, making it twitch, as though it has a mind of its own, which it very well might, but Lila grits her teeth, baring them to no one at all, pulling, and pulling, and…</p><p>And she’s got it. </p><p>She’s got it, and--</p><p>It’s not there anymore. It’s not caught between her fingertips, or on the counter, or the floor, or still in her arm; it had <em> never </em>been in her arm. It had never been.</p><p>There is only the tiny weight in her arm, the one she’d once found reassuring, as a dog finds a collar reassuring, in how it shows the world who he belongs to, and ensures he might never stray too far from home. </p><p><em>But what use is a fucking collar if your owner went and left you in the middle of a field to fend for yourself?</em> she thinks furiously.</p><p>She wants to carve her arm open. To peel her skin back, and pick at the thing with a pair of tweezers until it switches on and transmits, until someone, far off in the sea of time, hears her pinging and comes for her… And her nails aren’t sharp enough. And taking it out won’t be enough, will it, because no one’s even listening. </p><p>Lila cries out, feeling the hot, sticky weight of her tears starting to boil up in her eyes, slamming her fist into the counter. </p><p>There’s a little picture frame on the wall, one of the ones she’d turned over in spite, and she tears it off its place on the wall, whipping it at the trash can.</p><p>She stares, as it curves upwards, gracefully falling right into the bin, despite her sloppy toss. </p><p><em> What? </em> she thinks. </p><p>Lila takes a tentative step into the kitchen, and another, and another, towards the trash can, towards…</p><p>Pain. Pain as fine as cutting wire, crisscrossing across her foot.</p><p>Lila shrieks and jumps back, and there is glass all over the floor, glass from the picture frame, and she doesn’t understand how she <em> missed </em>it…</p><p>She straightens. Turns, and looks at the doorknob, which is…</p><p>Totally intact. Smooth and round and with not so much as a fingerprint on it. </p><p>She looks at the mirror, at the few shards of it left. The blood pooling in her fist when she squeezes it is real, but her eyes are black and shiny, and her hands are fine and long-fingered and brown and covered in angry red scratches. </p><p>It isn’t real. None of it is real. None of it is real, except for the pain. Except for the noise. </p><p>Lila sinks to the ground, cradling her foot in her hands, wincing as she peels the blood-soaked sock off of it. She thinks she gets it now. </p><p>There are too many people stuck inside of her now, too many voices, too many faces, too many thoughts and feelings. And none of them are hers. There’s nothing that’s hers, nothing at all. </p><p>In fact, she’s never had anything, <em>has</em> she, and she hates herself for it, for being so totally dependent on someone else to tell her what to do and who to be. Lila’s powers and her purpose and even her personality are all fragments of someone else’s, and she can never have anything of her own, anything that’s truly <em> hers. </em> Anytime she has it, something always comes along to take it away. </p><p>All these people, all these powers, all these memories, these feelings... She'd picked them up so quickly, without any thought, without any idea what the effect would be, if she'd gathered them all at once and let them pile up inside of her, coalescing and coagulating into a sludge of sloppy emotion and scattered memory, and now it's kicking up into a cyclone inside of her, roaring and moaning and clawing at the walls of her mind, looking for an out that she cannot give it. </p><p>Her head is so crowded now, that there’s no room for <em> her </em>anymore.</p><p>Lila is sitting in a house that had once been hers, or had it, or had that just been a dream, crowded in among the rest? She’d slept in a bed that had once been hers, or… or... Or, she had lived in an enormous mansion, in seven bedrooms at once, or she'd slept on a cot in a narrow concrete bunker deep in the mountains, in six different spaces at once, or...</p><p>She doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know. The more she tries to think, to separate her own thoughts from the storm of the others, the less she finds she's able to hang onto them. </p><p>She wants her mother. She wants both of them, either of them, someone, please to come sit next to her on the floor and hold her hand and wipe her choppy bangs from her sweat-soaked forehead with a hot towel and croon to her that things will be alright.</p><p>She wants her father. She wants <em> a </em>father, she wants…</p><p>She wants it all to stop. She wants to go home. She wants to be herself again. </p><p>No one comes for her but the noise, which keeps coming, and coming, and coming.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A rule of thumb I had with the birth mothers was that they all had to be unable or unwilling to take care of the children. Thinking about the Hargreeves kids, and the other spontaneous children, as an allegory for unwanted/inconvenient children that arrive to mothers who aren't capable of or willing to care for them is too strong a metaphor to pass up. It makes Lila's inclusion into this canon, seeing as she canonically had two loving parents, even more story-breaking, but I thought I'd keep it, as it adds to her status as the Hargreeves siblings' foil; she was the only kid to be sincerely loved and cared for, despite how she'd arrived.  </p><p>Also, another rule I had was that every single biomom had to be distinct enough in terms of her background and story. Hence, the variety in ages, in life statuses, in reasonings for giving up the child (if they got to do so), etc. </p><p>And another headcanon I hold pretty strongly to is that most of, if not all of, their mothers are dead. Having a full-term baby manifest in your womb and then pop right out is bound to do massive damage. Not everyone would survive.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. rhymes of yesterday</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The siblings are together again, and though it’s only been little more than a day since they’d parted, it already feels like they’ve been away from one another for far too long. This only becomes apparent upon their reunion outside the bunker where they’ve made camp, when each and every one of them feel that sinewy tugging deep within them, a sensation that is as welcome as it is painful.</p><p>Well, almost as painful as the one that rakes through Five’s back, after Mr. Pennycrumb rockets right into his abdomen and knocks him off his feet, so eager to lavish love upon his master that he forgets his own strength. </p><p>They reunite, a trio of teleporters and a foursome of aviators, all with their own sad stories to tell, and they are together. And, after a hushed, urgent conversation in which the seven of them exchange, briefly or in rather unnecessary detail, that things hadn’t exactly gone as planned, they realize that they are going to <em> stay </em>together.  </p><p>For Luther and Diego and Allison and Klaus and Five and Ben and Vanya, this is all they will have. They will never know ordinary families, or ordinary lives. So much has happened that even if they were to have been afforded the luxury of them, they would have chafed at them, at the constriction it would have inflicted upon them. The inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy are children of war, by their very nature, and the war has followed them everywhere. It would have followed them there too. Even now, after having saved the world and left their father's nest, they are still waiting for it to sweep down over their heads again. </p><p>They have no idea what they're going to do next, only that they will do it together.</p><p>“We can’t stay here,” Vanya had said then, glancing around the bunker. It had been a band-aid slapped over a bullethole, a temporary solution to the family’s lack of an address. But now that a month has worn on and their spell has been broken, it is clear that they cannot stay. Too much has happened here. It wouldn't do, to sit in a shattered husk forever. </p><p>So, the family Hargreeves had hunkered down to begin the process of picking through the bunker, to determine which of their spoils they would be keeping with them, and to begin a spirited argument about where they are to go from here. They won’t be leaving just yet, but they’ve made the choice to, so they need to prepare. </p><p>Mr. Pennycrumb has no such opinions. He is simply content to be with his family. </p><p>Speaking of, the puppy finally locates the all-important ball that had been left in their home, and upon doing so, he sniffs out Diego, who is sitting on the bench near the map that had sent them on their way to begin with. Mr. Pennycrumb drops the slobber-soaked ball into Diego’s lap, and then plops his heavy rear down onto the ground, sitting and watching him expectantly.</p><p>Diego stares at him. “What? Really?” </p><p>“Poor Diego,” Klaus remarks. “He only wants you for your body.”</p><p>“I’m heartbroken,” Diego replies dryly, as he sends the ball soaring out of the gaping hole in the bunker wall. Mr. Pennycrumb rockets off after it.</p><p>Allison and Luther have crept off to the kitchen, and the last he’s seen of them was Allison, burying her face in the crook between his neck and shoulder and looping her arms around him, which he hadn’t found particularly productive, but had strongly discouraged him from wanting to seek them out. </p><p>He glances around for Vanya, but she’s similarly gone. There’s the scraping of metal against concrete down the hall, which suggests to him where she might be. </p><p>Diego leans against the wall, pressing his back into the concrete and looking at his brothers, squabbling over something he’s sure isn’t particularly important. He has no idea where they’re going to go from here, or what they’re going to do. Life is so long, and they have so much of it, and it’s so strange, not having a mission to obsess over. <em> We need something, </em> he thinks, <em> to guide us. </em></p><p>“Has anyone seen her?” Five asks, rather suddenly, and Diego blinks, turning to look at him. Five has come to his side, unannounced, and is staring at the map, the one with all those little pinpricks in them, the one that they’ve obsessed over for weeks. </p><p>“Lila, I mean,” he clarifies, when he sees the look on Diego’s face.</p><p>She hadn’t come up in any of their stories about where they’ve been. No one seems to have encountered her, or is aware that they’ve encountered her. No one’s fought her, no one’s seen her, no one’s so much as caught a glimpse of the woman who’s hunted them across time and space. It’s odd, like the lull of quiet, before a thunderclap, or the moment of absolute silence before an explosion shatters the sound barrier.</p><p>Now, in having been apart from her for weeks, in having the time and distance to set aside the anger about his half-blindness, in not being distracted by the prospect of fighting for his life, he remembers what he’d been hoping they could do for her.</p><p>Lila is a deeply angry person. She’s been angry enough to hunt them anywhere, to follow them into another dimension, to follow them to hell, just for the opportunity to hurt them. Diego thinks he understands that anger. He’d been angry for so long, but under the skin, all the fury had ever been was pain. </p><p>He looks at his family, the distant shadows of Vanya and Allison and Luther, dancing off the floor from another room. At Klaus and Ben and Five. They’re all so different now. <em> He’s </em>different now, and if all of them have changed so completely, and for the better, why not her as well. </p><p><em> She might be it, </em> Diego thinks. <em> She might be our next step.  </em></p><p>“We need to find her,” Diego says. “We need to talk to her. I think we should try and help her.”</p><p>He assumes that Five will greet this idea with resistance, but to his surprise, Five looks to him, and nods firmly, saying, “We do.” </p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“I’ve been doing some thinking, Diego,” he says, “About where I intend to go from here, and I realize that I’ve done a lot that needs answering for.” He’s thought about it a great deal, and he knows that an exploration of the skeletons in his closet will be necessary. The worst of those skeletons are those of her parents, and beyond that… “We’ve done a lot of things in need of answering for. To her specifically. I know we hadn’t meant to, or else that we’d had no choice, but we still harmed her nonetheless.”</p><p>Diego nods solemnly, but Five isn’t quite paying attention to him anymore. He’s thinking of his own future now, of how he’s done with killing, with living violently. Of how it’s time to try something new, something <em> good. </em> </p><p>Five turns, and makes his way towards the room at the end of the hall, where he can hear Vanya scraping around.</p><p>Before he enters the room, he pauses, turning back to look at his brothers. They’re all gathered together now, as though they'd been waiting for him to leave them alone, and he only hears a snippet of whatever it is they’re talking about. </p><p>“I think we can make this work,” Ben is saying. “The three of us.”</p><p>“So I take it something happened on your field trip?” Klaus asks.</p><p>“Yeah,” Diego says. “You could, uh, say that.” </p><p>“No, really,” Ben insists. I think this could be a good thing, you know?”</p><p>“So, how do we do this?” Diego is asking wryly, “Is it like a timeshare? I get him on the weekdays, you on the weekends?”</p><p>There's laughter, the warm, easy laughter of three people who have realized something that should have been obvious all along, who are at last free enough to realize that there is room in their hearts for all three of them. </p><p>Five rolls his eyes, and decides to leave them to it. This is a private thing, a delicate thing, something that's been coming for a very long time and needs a careful hand to guide into place, and that hand won't be his. He is an interloper here, and he needs to give it the space it needs to breathe. Besides, he has his own future to think about. </p><p>Inside the room that they’ve taken to be their sleeping area, Vanya is kneeling beside her cot, stacking blobs of poorly-folded clothing high, and she hasn’t noticed him just yet. She does when he’s just behind her, moving to sit on the low cot by her side.</p><p>“Hey,” he says.</p><p>Vanya sets her work down, and looks up at him curiously. “Hi.”</p><p>Then, she registers the tired lines in his face. “Are you okay?” she asks. “These past few days… it’s been a lot.” </p><p>“I’m as well as can be expected,” Five replies. “You know, I never wanted to meet her anyway. So finding out what we did… well, it wasn’t half as crushing as I thought it’d be.”</p><p>“No?”</p><p>“Not at all. I’ve thought of her, as you’ve thought of yours, and all of our siblings have of their own mothers, but I’d never wanted to meet her.”</p><p>“Why’s that?”</p><p>“I never really saw the point, I suppose. You and everyone else, you’re all I’ve ever needed.” He looks at her carefully. “Though I suppose I might be alone in thinking this. I was wondering if you all would have… well, if you would have left, if you’d found your families willing to take you. Though in your case, you’re in a similar situation as I am, where the choice has been made for you.”</p><p>“I am.” Vanya sighs, her hair falling in her face. She sweeps it back behind her ears, and looks at him, rather urgently. “I want you to know something. I want you to know that even if she were alive,” Vanya says. “Even if she were a kind person who wanted me, I still would’ve come back. To you. To all of you. It's like you said. I belong here. I belong with you." She pauses, weighing her next words carefully; a part of her is terrified of saying it, even though at this point she already knows how he feels, but she has to. She has to admit what this is, to say it out loud. "Because I love you." </p><p>Five looks at her, just a bit unbelieving. His heart stops, and then starts again. "I love you too."</p><p>Vanya sighs, as if a great invisible weight has been lifted from her shoulders. "We make an odd pair."</p><p>"We're odd people. After all, you are <em>so</em> much younger than me."</p><p>Vanya laughs, soft and light. Any stranger who would look at them would have no idea what they are to each other, or who they are, or where they've been. It's like that with <em>all</em> of them, not just her and Five. </p><p>“We’re not normal people,” she says, “I mean, think about it. Normal families, with <em> normal </em> mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters? That’s not us. We couldn’t have been happy with them. It never would’ve stuck. In fact, we never <em> needed </em>that.” Thinking about it, Vanya is only more certain of it. That kind of environment, the sort of family that people are so obsessed with… it feels like a sort of death to her. A slow death, one that grinds her under its gears so slowly that it’ll take years before she even realizes she’s being crushed. “I think that we needed to go and see it for ourselves, to understand that.” </p><p>Five nods in agreement. The idea that just because a person has your blood, that they have a right to you, or that someone who doesn’t know them at all might have a say in what they are to each other… oh, it infuriates him. “They wouldn’t have understood,” he says. “No one really can, except for us. We should be beholden to no one. We’re not a real family. Or, at least, not real in the way that anyone would define it. We’re not even really an adopted family; there are no papers or official documents or anything. More like a doomsday cult that played dress-up as one.” </p><p>“We can change that,” Vanya says quietly, her hand finding his. “We’ve all been looking for families for our entire lives, but all we’ve ever needed was to make our own. We have each other, and we can build this family into whatever we want it to be. Whatever suits us best.”</p><p>Five stares down at their entwined hands, at what she has promised him, and smiles. He squeezes her hand. The future is so close. They're not there yet, but they're on the precipice of that golden world, and he can see what's waiting for them there and maybe, just maybe, they can all finally have something that is good, that is all theirs.</p><p>“In fact," Vanya says, with a private little smile. “I think we’re already starting on that.”</p><p>“What do you mean?” Five asks.</p><p>Vanya knows this isn’t really her secret to reveal, but she can’t resist. And besides, she’s revealing it to <em> Five, </em> so of course it’s safe. She smiles, leaning in to whisper, “Allison’s pregnant.”</p><p>Five stares at her, as if she’s made a joke. “No she’s not.”</p><p>“She is. She told me. She and Luther are having a baby. You’re an uncle, and so are Klaus and Diego and Ben. And I’m an aunt. Or… well, we <em> will </em>be, again.” </p><p>“No,” Five says. He’s shaking his head, blinking quickly. </p><p>“I know it sounds way too early for us to tell, but Allison says she rumored it, so it’s coming--”</p><p>“No, you don’t understand,” Five says again, firmer, springing up, and charging out of the room.</p><p>Vanya leaps up and hurries after him, following questioningly. </p><p>Five enters the kitchen, where Luther and Allison are leaning against the industrial steel counter, in the midst of a conversation that his presence has interrupted. </p><p>“You think you’re pregnant?” he says, far more accusatorily than he’d intended.</p><p>Allison frowns, staring past him, to where Vanya’s only just entering. “Oh, thanks for spreading the news, Vanya.”</p><p>“Sorry.”</p><p>“It’s…” Allison sighs, waving a hand. “Whatever. Yes, Five, I’m pregnant. We’re having a baby.” Her eyes go cold. “Don’t tell me you’re going to have a problem with that.”</p><p>Five looks away for a moment, searching for the right way to say this. But there isn’t one. And there isn’t a right time to say it either. She has to know now, before this goes any further. Before she figures it out on her own. “Allison, you’re not.”</p><p>Allison stares at him, as if he’s grown a second head. </p><p>“You <em> can’t </em>be, don’t you see?”</p><p>“No, Five, I <em> don’t </em>see.” She tenses, looking at the way pain’s knotting up his face, the pain of struggling to determine how to reveal a terribly sad secret.</p><p>And she thinks for a moment. She’d rumored it, so it’s <em> certain, </em> isn’t it? She’d made it happen. She’d spoken it out into the universe, and the universe shall deliver it to her… <em> hadn’t </em>she? </p><p>Allison can rumor the mind, and she can rumor the body, but she cannot rumor the impossible. She cannot bring a person back to life. She can rumor a bone to heal perfectly, but it cannot happen all at once. She can rumor Luther’s wound to heal perfectly, but it will heal at its own pace, and not hers. She cannot rumor Diego’s eye to work again, because after what’s been done to it, this is the best that it can do. She can rumor a healthy pregnancy, so long as it is possible for it to occur at all.</p><p>And the thing is, “it’s not possible, Allison.”</p><p>Allison drags in a heavy breath. “Why not?”</p><p>Here’s the thing: Time safeguards itself from destruction, and there is no destruction quite so complete as the entangling of a family tree. Time is a line, and in order for it to remain a line, and not become a knot, certain precautions have to be taken. To prevent a bootstrap loop as detrimental as a traveler becoming their own ancestor, whether intentionally or otherwise, any traveler exposed to the particular sort of radiation emitted by the space between space, the time between time, is rendered irrevocably sterile. Five’s shaking as he tells her, knowing that what he’s revealing to Allison is utterly devastating. “You never were,” he says. “You never will be. None of us can have our own children. It’s been that way since we escaped the apocalypse.” </p><p>Allison folds her hands over her abdomen, and is still as a statue. Beside her, Luther has turned white, as he folds a hand over his mouth. </p><p>Then she flies at Five, catching him around the neck and slamming him into the wall. She doesn’t want to kill him, just to make him <em> hurt </em> for a second, to punish him for saying what he’s said, as true as it is. He coughs raggedly, and looks at her without a twinge of anger. “This isn’t just about you, Allison. It’s all of us. <em> All </em>of us are like this.”</p><p>“No?” Allison says, but even she doesn’t believe her own words. “No, you don’t understand.”</p><p>“Hey!” Vanya snaps. “Break that up, <em> right </em>now!”</p><p>“Allison,” Luther says, and his enormous hands are on her, gently tugging her away. He isn’t applying any force at all, in fact, and his touch is more a suggestion than a command. </p><p>“You’re right,” Five replies. Allison is holding him tightly, but not so tightly that he cannot speak. “I don’t. I don’t even know if I would have wanted something like that for myself. There was never a time for me to even consider it. It was impossible for me as soon as I was old enough to want it.” </p><p>Allison’s hands around Five’s neck loosen, and then fall away. When Luther pulls her back, she knows it is just as much due to her own movements as it is with him. He isn’t tugging her away, so much as she is allowing him to do so.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Five rasps, bringing a hand up to massage his throat. </p><p>Allison simply turns away, wrapping her arms around her middle, and staring into open space. She feels as though all her emotions have been sucked out of her at once, like oxygen out an airlock. She knows, of course, that this is a situation in which they are all blameless; when they time-traveled, that very first time, there had been no time for Five to sit and teach the lot of them all the side effects, and even if he had, Allison would not have minded. She'd have rather lived. She'd still rather live. If they travel back to that exact moment, she'd have made the same choice.</p><p>But it still hurts. This thing she wants, this new chapter in her life she's been so excited to start... it's not coming. It's not coming at all, and the visceral emotional shock of the revelation hasn't left her body yet. <em> It’s not fair, </em> she thinks, looking up at Luther's crestfallen face, realizing that she isn't the only person being denied something wonderful. <em> It’s not fair at all.   </em></p><p>There isn’t enough time to ruminate any further.</p><p>Somewhere outside the kitchen, there’s a shrill metallic ringing. </p><p>It takes thirteen seconds for the siblings to determine that they are listening to a phone. There had been one, tucked into the corner of the living area, built right into the wall, but it had never rung once in all their time here; in fact, whenever one would lift the receiver to their ear, they would find it had no dial tone at all.</p><p>Silence. Someone in the other room has picked it up. </p><p>“Guys?” Ben leans into the doorway, white as a ghost. “It’s Dad. He wants to talk.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>They meet on neutral ground.</p><p>The seven siblings, plus Mr. Pennycrumb, pile into the Minerva, and drive her out to where they have agreed to speak with their father. He has refused to talk to them over the phone, and It would be perverse, almost, to let him into the bunker. They’re already insulting it with their presence, and one more slight simply isn’t acceptable. </p><p>They land on a flat grassy plain in Switzerland, a place that means nothing to them, and to their father, where neither will have an upper hand against the other. Where, if need be, they can fight without consequence. </p><p>The siblings arrive first, and are kept waiting nearly an hour. In that hour, they are all silent, casting quick glances at one another, and listening to their hearts kick nervous drumbeats into the insides of their ribcages. Mr. Pennycrumb paces busily from one to the next, demanding pats.</p><p>Their father arrives amidst the purple and gold bloom of twilight, dragging a bright trail of rocketplane exhaust as he zips in from beyond the Alps, making a sleek, curving descent. </p><p>The seven of them fan out into a line, all staring at the aircraft as it descends coolly and alights on the ground, sending up a cyclone of whirling air. Mr. Pennycrumb’s shoulder brushes against Five’s thigh, and Five gives him a quick command, to stay right where he is. </p><p>Their father emerges in a hiss from the cockpit, stepping casually out of the plane and peeling his goggles off his head, setting them on the wing and leaning on his cane. </p><p>As he does, Mr. Pennycrumb takes a great sniff of the air, and his ears flatten to his skull. He begins swaying his wide head back and forth, from Reginald to the children, as if he’s following a conversation that is not occurring yet. Then, his gaze settles on Reginald, and his eyes bulge out of his skull as his hackles raise. He hasn’t barked, so much as growled.</p><p>Reginald studies his wayward children carefully. They are not wearing the uniforms he’d assigned them, and do not stand stalwart. Rather, they look like a collection of people who couldn’t look less like they belonged together if they tried. </p><p>And beyond them, the round, vaguely owlish face of the Minerva. </p><p>Sir Reginald takes a step forwards, and then another. He makes his way across the field’s short distance, to his children, who leap out of his way as if he were approaching them while engulfed in flame. </p><p>He is not concerned with them. He is concerned with the ship. </p><p>“What?” snaps Luther.</p><p>“I hadn’t seen this vessel in years,” he says, reaching out to run a hand along the burnished coppery side. For a moment, he considers saying nothing at all. Then he decides against it. He sees no point in withholding the truth to them any longer. If anything, he determines that the best way to bring his children back to them is to give it to them wholesale. “It’s been far, far longer, since I had arrived in it. Does it still fly well?”</p><p>“Yes?” Luther says, </p><p>“Even beyond the exosphere?” </p><p>“What?”</p><p>Reginald sighs. He’s been cursed with such idiots for children. “That is the ship’s original purpose and intent. To travel comfortably both across and between planets.” </p><p>“And you’ve done this? You… arrived. In this?” Ben says.</p><p>Their father raises a gray, bristling eyebrow at him. </p><p>“So you’re a space alien?” Klaus says, half joking.</p><p>Their father nods only once. </p><p>And his children freeze for a moment, absorbing the revelation, and trying to determine if it is true. </p><p>Five glances down at Mr. Pennycrumb, who is hunched over like a gargoyle, simply staring at their father in a way he has never seen his puppy behave. He’d thought it simply because he was reading the moods of his people, but now Five recognizes the dog’s behavior for what it is: utter bewildered terror in realizing that the human in front of him is not a human at all.</p><p>Allison stiffens. She remembers the rumor, the only one she had ever tried on her father. Now she understands why it had not worked; it had not been some unknown error on her part, but it had been <em> him </em>the entire time. It had been that her power only works on humans. </p><p>Luther recoils. He remembers the science. Their father is one of the foremost inventors of his age, a feat that he had once deeply respected him for. He is responsible for the cerebral advancement of the chimpanzee, for every spacecraft trend in the last fifty years, including the rocketplane, which… now that he’s looking at it, looks so <em> much </em>like the Minerva. Luther had once wondered how on earth their father had devised his plans, how he’d synthesized such technologies. Now he knows. </p><p>He sums it up: “Fuck.” </p><p>Reginald stares at his children’s ashen, gaping faces, and sighs. He’s never explained this to anyone before. But, for the sake of the world, he shall try.</p><p>And for the sake of the reader, so shall the narrator.</p><p>From the furthest reaches of the universe, deep in afterspace, there had been a planet, gasping out the last of its breaths. It had fallen prey to the sort of catastrophic calamity that is in its very nature inevitable, and awaiting all planets and all lives at their conclusion. It had been experiencing its very own apocalypse.</p><p>Sir Reginald Hargreeves, then not known by that name, had the great misfortune of having been alive during the unfolding of said catastrophe. He had watched his world die, slowly at first, then faster, and faster, and <em> faster, </em> until suddenly, it was simply gone, and there was nothing left but an empty ball of mud and dust and cinder, rolling through the dark void of space. Until he was utterly alone, having watched his ill wife choose to let herself go with the world, rather than flee it in search of someplace new. </p><p>He had been alone, and had known the sort of loneliness that only the very last members of critically endangered species know, as they sit and count down the hours until their own deaths, until their kind finally ceases to be altogether. If anything, his had been far greater, as he had been quite cognizant of his aloneness, and because he had been the very last living piece of his world. </p><p>The man who would someday be known as Sir Reginald Hargreeves knew that there would be no bringing back what he had lost. It was gone, gone to oblivion, and he would not find his original home in this lifetime. Stela was gone, his species was gone, his civilization was gone, and that was all there was to it. Once the tide is out, it is out. </p><p>But he knew that he intended to survive. That the very best way to avenge his lost world was to carry it with him, and the very best way to avenge his lost life was to build a new one, and so, in knowing that the world was due to end, he had set his sights far, far away, deeper into the heart of the universe. </p><p>There was a planet there, capable of not only supporting life, but with a suitable enough atmosphere and climate that would accommodate him, so long as he assimilated just enough. And it was there that the man who would become Reginald Hargreeves had decided to reinvent himself. </p><p>But to do so, he had to know that this world was going to survive. He had to know that he would not be forced to live through another such calamity, the kind that had burned into the insides of his eyelids and consumed his waking and dreaming thoughts. He had to <em> know </em> that the world that would become his own would never end, that he could <em> turn </em>the tide if he so chose to.</p><p>“So,” he says to his audience of stunned children, “I decided upon you. I had come to this planet in the first place, following the sparks of life that would someday yield the seven of you, and all the rest of your siblings. I had released them, and sent them to seed upon the Earth, and came here to await their arrival.” He frowns, recalling the decades of waiting, of building companies to amass enough wealth to prepare for their coming, but also to pass the time. “It occurred later than I had anticipated.”   </p><p><em> “You </em> made us?” Five says numbly.</p><p>Vanya considers it. How quickly she’d gone off such an intense medication regimen, twice now, and had somehow experienced so few side effects. How she’d been on such a heavy prescription since she was four years old, and somehow had not died or experienced any adverse side effects in the way her body had developed. </p><p>Ben considers it. How intensely their father had always insisted on their avoiding any hospitals. How they were always, always, <em> always </em>treated in the undersized, outdated medical bay by himself, by Grace, or by Pogo. </p><p>Diego considers it. How so many women had suddenly conceived, gestated and birthed so many babies, without having reproduced, without the involvement of a father at all. <em> Well, </em> he thinks, turning green. <em> Turns out we did have one.  </em></p><p>Klaus considers it. How, upon playfully asking the little girl who may or may not be God, who he is now fairly certain <em> is </em>God and had just been playing coy, if she had, in fact, made them. How she had stared at him, as if he’d crossed some grand, unspeakable line and committed an ancient taboo. How she had refused to answer, and in doing so, had given it to him anyway. </p><p>“We’re not human,” Klaus says. “Are we?”</p><p>“Partially,” Dad allows. “Your powers are decidedly not, and a few small features here and there. Biologically, however, you share no common threads with me. Your bodies <em> are </em>human, your DNA having been drawn entirely from the uteruses of your respective surrogates in your conception guarantees that. Or at least, you are human enough to pass. Enough to breed, which I must admit was an unfortunate oversight on my part.”</p><p>Allison grinds her teeth together. “Excuse me?”</p><p>“No responsible experiment would allow its subjects to reproduce in such an uncontrolled manner. I must admit, I had assumed I had accounted for such a variable. I was mistaken.” </p><p>“Subjects,” repeats Diego, numbly, in the same second as Allison, who blurts out, “Why would you <em> do </em>that?”</p><p>“You were meant to save the world,” Reginald says, utterly firm in his belief that it was so, and that it was right, and it was just. “That is why you were made, why you are extraordinary. That is your sole purpose. All the rest is simply noise.” </p><p>Five makes a choked little noise, something caught between an exasperated scoff and an exhausted sigh.</p><p>“Now, I trust that you’ve found what you’re looking for,” Dad says, when the sharp silver tip of his cane bores into the earth. </p><p>His children frown, and cast sidelong glances at each other. </p><p>Klaus sets his jaw. “You <em> knew. </em> That we were looking for our birth mothers.”</p><p>“Don’t be slow, of <em> course </em>I did. You’ve been living in the same vicinity as my files on the subject, and knowing your penchant for sticking your noses into things that must be left well enough alone, it was certain that you would discover them.” </p><p>“How many others are there?” Diego asks. “Don’t say there were just the seven of us, because there <em> weren’t. </em> Don’t say there were thirteen of us, because there weren’t. There’s Lila, and there are the kids in your files, the ones that told us where to find our families, and I know you’re keeping even more from us. You’d never give us all of it at once.”</p><p>Their father regards them all critically through the glass eye of his monocle, and his shoulders shift, in the slightest suggestion of a shrug. “In total, there were forty-three women like those that birthed you.” </p><p>“Total?” Ben frowns. “So you knew there were forty-three of us?” </p><p>“No,” replies their father, “There were forty-six.” At the sight of his children’s confused glances, he sighs, inconvenienced by the extreme labor of explaining himself, and elaborates: “There were forty-three mothers, who gave birth to forty-six children. Forty-one single births, one set of twins, of which two are present here and I assume that at this point you are aware of their identities, and one of triplets, all of whom expired before I could obtain them.” </p><p>Luther grimaces. <em> Triplets. That’s gotta hurt. </em></p><p>“There are forty of us now,” Vanya says numbly, mostly to herself.</p><p>“No,” replies her father. “Just eight.” </p><p>“Just…” Diego trails off.</p><p>“Yes,” confirms Dad coolly, “Being spontaneous in nature, most of the women who gave birth were not in opportune locations to do so. Many of the children died just after labor, in the minutes, hours, days and weeks after. Some were killed, some were abandoned. Some bought, or adopted. Some survived infancy, but with powers as volatile as they were, they inevitably destroyed themselves. In fact, you seven are the only ones of your kind to survive as long as you have.”</p><p>“Not the only ones,” Diego says.</p><p>“You seven, and the <em> other </em>one,” Reginald allows. </p><p>“Lila,” Five corrects. </p><p>“Yes,” Dad says, an icy eye scrutinizing him carefully, like he’s trying to flay open his skin. Five holds his gaze, even when his skin starts crawling. “I am <em> aware </em>of her.” </p><p>“And our mothers?” Ben snaps, “You were <em> aware </em> of them. Why the hell wouldn’t you <em> tell </em>us?”</p><p>“Because you are my children,” Reginald replies, “And I love you.”</p><p>(Let it be clear that Reginald Hargreeves does, in fact, love his children. He just loves them in the same way that a hammer might love a nail.)</p><p>The words hit so strangely. None of his children have ever heard him say that before. </p><p>Allison crosses her arms. “Is it because we’re your <em> children, </em> or is it because we’re <em> yours?” </em> she snaps. </p><p>He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Whatever it would’ve been, Allison knows it wouldn’t matter. She of all people knows that just because you might love your child doesn’t mean you’ll treat them well. </p><p>“Because you need me,” he replies. “You always have. You always will. None of you have ever been capable of truly standing on your own. You are a collective. You were <em> born </em>for this, and you will always need me to guide you.” </p><p>For what it’s worth, their father had not told them about where they’d come from for many reasons. He had kept these reasons to himself all his life, but for the sake of clarity, they shall be listed here:</p><p>To maintain his fine sense of control over them, as if they had known that an alternative to the life they were bound to existed, they’d have surely fled in search of it. </p><p>To heighten their focus, as they are not ordinary children bound to ordinary childhoods, but extraordinary children bound to the fate of the world. They would be wasted on public school and playdates and games of ball on Sundays, or whatever it is that ordinary children did. From the very moment of their births, they were meant for greatness. </p><p>To protect them from the pain of knowing. Nothing is ever so beautiful as what one imagines in one’s own mind; Sir Reginald knows this better than anyone, as he had imagined that his Academy would be competent and obedient, which he had found to be disappointingly untrue.</p><p>And most important of all, to remove hope from them, the hope that they might have something different, that they might belong somewhere else, that the answers to the deep, fundamental questions they have about themselves might have an answer that does not stem from him. </p><p>If one asked Sir Reginald why he had seen fit to remove hope from his children, he would claim it had been from love. And at least in his own mind, shaped by his own experiences, and his own dead dreams and lost hopes, it would have been true. </p><p>Of course, no matter one’s intent, there is no loving way to remove hope from a child. There is no loving way to snatch the veils of innocence and imagination away, to grab them by the head and point them at a face howling in pain and hiss in their ear that <em> this is what the world is, pain and terror and disappointment, and all your dreams will turn to dust, because mine did, and you will be left bitter and alone, so you’d best get used to it if you want to survive. </em></p><p>Survive being the key word. Sir Reginald had done what he had done to his children in the hopes that they might be survivors, that they might do what those before them had never done, and escape the jaws of death, and aid others in the same pursuit. </p><p>But the thing is, what they had really needed, rather than the push to survive, was the push to <em> live. </em> </p><p>Their father had given them the former, had ensured that it stemmed from him alone. As for the latter, they’re in the process of finding it together. They’d found that hope anyway, and, in reading the looks on their faces, and the way their bodies sidle closer together, Reginald realizes that they hadn’t found it in him. </p><p>“Leave,” Luther says, his voice seething with quiet anger. “Right now. We’re done with you.”</p><p>Unexpectedly, their father obliges, perhaps because he had determined that if he had done so of his own accord, then it would not mean that he had been commanded to do so. He strides smoothly across the plain, staring at his children with utter disdain. Such failures, they’d turned out to be. So <em> ungrateful, </em> that even when he had gone and revealed the extent of their origin to them, and their truest purpose, they’d still rejected it. They’ve doomed themselves, and they’ve doomed the world. He’d have done much better, if he’d just gone and recruited some of the other children first. If only he’d looked harder when they’d first arrived. </p><p>His children watch him leave. All are utterly still, save Klaus, who trails after him, and finds his voice when his father has his aviation cap in his hands. </p><p>“Our mothers,” Klaus says, an odd lilt to his voice. “Why’d you choose them?”</p><p>“I didn’t,” their father replies coolly. “The nature of the selection was entirely random in nature. I had no control over where and how you appeared, not that I particularly minded. I could simply care less who bore you, so long as you were born. Who it was that had you doesn’t matter at all.”</p><p>“Oh,” Klaus says, his blood pumping in his ears and singing a song so violent, so unlike him, that it makes Vanya’s head whip around to look at him. “Okay.”</p><p>Klaus lurches forward.</p><p>He doesn’t really think about what he’s going to do when he reaches his father. He just knows he wants to beat the shit out of him, maybe until his skull caves in, maybe until his eyes pop like rotten grapes between his fingers. That would be nice. That would be fitting.</p><p>But Vanya is there, to catch him by his heartbeat, and send him skidding backwards on his heels, to smack onto the ground, hard on his back.</p><p>He gasps like a landed fish, and stares up at Vanya, glaring at her like he wants to rake her eyes out with his nails. “What are you <em> doing?” </em> he spits.</p><p>“It’s not worth it,” Vanya says firmly, keeping a vise-grip on each of her siblings, as she can feel their own bodies shifting, filling with a similar sort of violence.</p><p>She doesn’t let go until their father has sealed the cockpit of his rocketplane, until it’s let off a sonic blast so great it shakes her focus and makes her lose hold on them.</p><p>He is gone, and they are alone together.</p><p>“What the hell was <em> that?” </em> Diego snarls. “Don’t tell me that <em> now, </em> of all times, you have a fucking soft spot for the old bag?”</p><p>“Of course not,” Vanya spits. “But there isn’t a point in it, in killing him. What would that <em> solve?” </em></p><p>Allison scoffs, shaking her head. </p><p>“You want him to live?” Five snaps.</p><p>“Yes,” she insists. “I do. I want him to live. I want him to live for a long time, all alone in that big empty house. I want him to spend years walking around, listening to how quiet it is, knowing that we’re not there. I want him to grow old and <em> die, </em> knowing that we rejected him and moved on.” </p><p>It’s a beautiful thought, and in a kinder world, that would have been so. The family Hargreeves would have built a nest far and away from their father, and they would have gritted their teeth and dug their heels into the dirt and learned to live as ordinary people. They would have gotten jobs, and gone to school, and carried on and in the beginning they would have been angry and sad and afraid, but with time, it would have healed. In that kinder world, those flashes of comfort, of happiness, of safety, would be rare and well fought-for at first, but then they would grow and flower and bear fruit, and the family Hargreeves would think of their father less and less and then not at all, as his castle rotted from the inside out and his bones crumbled to dust.</p><p>In a kinder world, this would have been the last time the seven siblings had ever seen their father.</p><p>This is not that world, and it will not become that world in time. They are not finished with him just yet, and will see him one last time, just before the world’s due to end.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Grace closes her eyes, and then opens them. </p><p>In the span of a single second, she has been transformed. She has updated herself with her newest build, and in doing so, has passed from her third life to her fourth. This time, she retains all the memories of her predecessor, and so when she sits up, and looks to Pogo, who is staring at her with slight trepidation, she smiles brightly, and reaches up to take his weathered hands into her plastic ones. </p><p>“Thank you,” she says, squeezing them gently, and leaning in to plant a kiss on the top of his head.</p><p>Her voice is different now. It is deeper, less trilling, with a slight husk to it. It is the original voice she had discovered at the very core of her memory, the one that calls out across time from hours upon hours of recorded conversations. The woman Grace had been modeled after had recorded dozens of hours of audio reports, and had sat in on a linguistics experiment that Reginald had overseen, having been utterly unaware of the purpose of said experiment. </p><p>She makes a few noises, rattles through the alphabet in seven languages, and conjugates a few verbs, to get the hang of it. Pogo nods at her, guiding her along, and she recalls an audio session deep in her memory bank, in which the woman she was modeled after had been coaxing his child self through the very same one. </p><p>She is touched, that he would return the favor fifty years later. </p><p>Grace gives him another kiss, before rising to her feet, and striding out of the mechanical bay. She has been in the basement for nearly a day, hunched over her programming, and she has much to do. </p><p>She is still very much the same person as she had been before she had reset herself. She still has hundreds of recipes memorized, and the ability to organize to-do lists and itineraries and recall them perfectly. She can still style hair and mend tears and apply perfect makeup. She can still deep-clean a house, top to bottom, and arrange all the decor within it to an aesthetically pleasing standard. She can still stitch up a bullet wound or apply vaccinations. She still recalls over a thousand children’s stories, and can access her mothering protocols. She still loves her family. </p><p>But she can do so much <em> more </em>now. </p><p>Grace can access years of complex psychological knowledge, the sort of knowledge she had once only had a rudimentary understanding of, because of its pertinence to raising children. She has years of studies on the care and cognition of primates memorized, and most important of all, she can decide for herself what she wants to do. </p><p>She doesn’t have to abide by a schedule that dictates her movements, or her outfits, or her activities. She doesn’t have to smile constantly. She doesn’t have to listen to Reginald, if she doesn’t want to.</p><p>She doesn’t have to stay in the house.</p><p>And now, in her newest and fullest form, Grace is bound not by the directives of a mother, or a nanny, or a wife, or the simulacrum of a mother, or a nanny, or a wife, but by her own desires.</p><p>She has desires now, and she desires to leave. So she will. </p><p>Grace pulls one of Reginald’s suitcases out from a wardrobe on the third floor. It’s one of the old ones, one of the smaller ones, with a dent in its side, and he has not used it in a decade because of that small flaw. He will not notice its absence, which is why she has chosen it. </p><p>She carries it across the hall, to the dressing room that had been reserved for her use. She sits at the vanity, and there unpins her hair, and runs a hot comb through it, to smooth out the indents left by thirty years’ worth of curls. Now, the synthetic hair has only a gentle wave to it when she is finished.</p><p>Grace then turns to her closet. Inside, all of her dresses are pressed and hanging neatly, all her heels lined up like brightly-colored candies in glass jars in a line along the wall. She selects the black velvet dress, the one her predecessor was instructed to wear only at funerals and somber functions, and puts it on. It does not hug her figure, and the neckline is high, and she has no pearls to fasten around her neck, but it does quite nicely. She does not bother selecting any shoes; she will have to stop off at a department store to find the sort of boot she will need, one that is sturdy enough to walk for miles of rough wilderness in (or will at least not break until her journey is partially complete) which will fit the high arched shape her feet have been permanently molded to. </p><p><em>A department store,</em> she thinks pleasantly. She has never been to one before. What an adventure! She's about to embark on so many!</p><p>Grace does not take her dresses down from the closet. She does not fold them or put them in the case. She has no need for them, being a robot; it had all been aesthetics, and though Grace has retained her appreciation for styling and fashion in her new build, she understands that they are optional, and what she is looking for is decidedly not. She pushes them aside, and reaches for the large, infant-sized spare battery lying on the floor, obscured by her frilly skirts. She picks it up, and nestles it into the case. </p><p>Grace can leave the house now. The permissions for it existed deep inside that trove of restricted coding, and it is now free for her to use. She intends to do so. </p><p>The only true obstacle baked into her, now that her coding has been amended, is her own battery capacity; every evening, she must be charged for several hours, and the only station in the house is located on her mezzanine. She suspects that this is intentional design on Reginald’s part, and cannot override her own battery capacity. </p><p>But she can step around it, by bringing her power supply with her. Reginald had kept a few spares lying around, as every year or so the charging station itself would require a replacement to its core. </p><p>One such core is now in her possession. For one year, Grace is free to go anywhere at all.</p><p>She is not certain what will happen after that year. She is taking it one step at a time. First, she shall leave the house. Then, she shall… well. She must leave the house first. </p><p>She is finished in her dressing room, so she closes up the wardrobe, switches off the lights, and carries the case out without a second look. Her memory of this room is perfect, and she may relive it any time she chooses. There is no reason at all to look back.</p><p>On the second floor, Grace realizes she is not alone any longer. Her auditory sensors determine that Reginald is walking down the hall, that there is a second gait beside him, the gait of a guest. It is one that Grace vaguely recognizes the pattern of, loping like a fox, but she decides not to inquire further into it. Her goal is to leave, not to pry.</p><p>She must pass Reginald to do so. The infirmary lies on the hall connecting the staircase she has descended with the one that will lead her down to the foyer. </p><p>Grace keeps walking, keeps the clicking of her heels consistent, as it would be suspicious to do otherwise. The suitcase is in her arms, and she is wearing a dress she should not ordinarily be wearing, as black is reserved for very particular functions. </p><p>There’s the sweep of Reginald’s suit jacket, the flash of his cane’s silver handle, the flicker of a thin, dark shadow in step behind him, as he and his companion walk right into the infirmary. </p><p>The door has been left open, and Grace walks right past, keeping her face forward. </p><p>There is no outcry, no call for her to explain herself. Reginald had not noticed her at all. He hasn't even noticed her absence. He is quite unobservant when it comes to the things he does not want to see. </p><p>Grace descends the staircase, sorting over the details of where she intends to go next. It is obvious to her, what her next step must be, and--</p><p>And standing in the foyer, Pogo is peering up at her. There is a little, chimpanzee-sized suitcase by his foot, and an umbrella in the crook of his arm. Even if she had not had decades of data on him dictating her interpretation of his actions, she would find it quite obvious to deduce his intentions. </p><p>“Hello,” Grace says, coming to a halt just in front of him. “I can’t recall if we’ve discussed this. Are you coming with me?”</p><p>Pogo blinks. “I… hadn’t planned on it.” </p><p>“Then you are leaving in your own regard.”</p><p>“I am,” he says, his eyes flicking nervously across the foyer, and up towards the mezzanine, fearful of being overheard. </p><p>Grace does not share his fear. Reginald is busy with his guest, and pays them as much attention as he might a piece of furniture. Only when they are in use, or when they are not where they are meant to be within eyeshot, does he care about them. And he is not using them, nor is he within eyeshot, so they are quite safe, at least for the moment. She opens the door to the coatroom, and selects an umbrella her size, having determined from Pogo's behavior, and from the dingy gray glare outside of the windows she had passed on her way down that it shall storm very soon. </p><p>“He’ll be quite cross with us when he finds out what we’ve done, after all,” Pogo points out, and Grace smiles. </p><p>“Well then,” she says, offering him her gloved hand. His gray fingers curl around it. “We’d best get going then.”  </p><p>He smiles. “Yes. It’s beyond time.” </p><p>And so they go, hand in hand, into the world.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Lila is alone, and she has no idea what to do.</p><p>After spending hours and hours of waiting, no one has come back to the flat. No one is coming. No one is coming home. </p><p>Home.</p><p>No, this isn’t her home. This hasn’t been her home for twenty-three years… no, that’s not right, it’s meant to be twenty-five years; Lila is two years younger than she should be, in a time where she shouldn’t be. She’d been plucked up and carried away to a time outside of time, and she’d never found her way back into it, never found a time in which she fits. She keeps ending up alone, wherever she is. </p><p>She doesn’t live in this flat, which is no longer warm. She doesn’t live in Brent. She hasn’t lived here since she was hardly old enough to stand up and waddle around. She doesn’t eat in this kitchen, which is no longer butter-yellow. She doesn’t shower in this bathroom, or sleep in this bed, which does not have mermaids on the blankets. She doesn’t go to a stuffy, underfunded school five days a week, doesn’t go home to argue with Ronnie and Anita about what sort of job she should get. </p><p>Home is an extra-long twin bunk in a tidy brick dormitory, with souvenirs from her travels pasted on the wall. Prom night in Pasadena, and the World’s Fair in Chicago, and Beijing during the War… Home is meeting Mother in her office for lunch, painting her nails with a cigarette waggling on her lips as she chats about her latest assignment and asks about when she’ll get to be Head of Security. Home is working herself to the bone on an obstacle course, leaping in a graceful arc in the air, to escape the volley of bullets Mother has trained on her, to make sure that she’s not slacking off. Home is a hundred different places in a thousand different times, a whirl of light and color and sights and sounds and scents, and just enough time to glimpse it before it’s gone again. </p><p><em> No, </em> she thinks. <em> No, it’s not anymore. Mother is dead, and the Home Office is in ruins, and there’s no bringing it back. </em></p><p>Home is a flat stripe of tarp bound tightly over a metal frame in a Spartan concrete room nestled deep in the mountains. Home is watching the sun paint the summit snows orange, and tracking a timberwolf’s prints for miles, and racing to the top of a peak, and sharing dream after dream after dream and knowing that you will never, ever be alone. It’s sitting and chatting with Mom, her emerald-shining cube glowing as she spouts out a recipe for your brothers to prepare. </p><p>But Mom is shattered and that home is destroyed, and that family is dead, and it’s half her fault. </p><p>Home is a hardtack mattress in a room half the size of that of the brother you share a wall with. It’s the checkerboard floor that she slides across in her stockings, right after Mom has waxed it. It’s bouncing balls off mahogany walls and sticking her skinny little legs in the gaps between the bars of the banister and letting them dangle into open air. It’s a scratchy wool skirt, and painting glue on her face so the mask will stay. It’s memorizing Shakespeare and Homer while slipping a hand under the desk to touch the palm of the girl sitting next to you. It’s staring up at Dad’s grim, hawklike face, in the hopes that you’ve leapt through enough hoops and present good enough marks on his experiments to warrant a nod of approval. </p><p>But… well, no. This house is still standing. This Dad is alive, but he does not know her at all. This family is alive, but it is lost to her, with so much bad blood between them that she’ll drown if she so much as takes a step towards crossing over to them. </p><p>Home is… is... oh, those aren’t <em> her </em> memories, are they? Where are <em> hers </em>going? Why are they sifting through her fingers like sand in a storm, and why is the wind whipping them away from her?</p><p>The pain is back, no, it’s been here the whole time, pounding in her head like machine gun fire, so intense that she cannot sleep, cannot eat, cannot do much else than think, and poorly. Lila doesn’t understand why Mother hadn’t told her about this, why she hadn't let her learn. What was the point of dangling such wondrous power right in front of her face, only to snatch it out of her hands? Mother had saved her for a reason, had raised her for a reason, so what <em> was </em>it? Lila thinks of her mother’s lovely glass cases, full of trophies, and of her own place among them, as the crowning jewel of her collection.</p><p><em>Was that it?</em> She thinks. <em>Was that all you intended? Was</em> <em>it really just that you wanted to have me, and to put me somewhere you could look at me, and know that I couldn’t be anyone else’s?</em></p><p>She wants Mother. She wants her to lean down and tell her the truth, or some version of it, or a lie, or anything at all. </p><p>She wants Mother to come clicking in on her cherry-red heels through the front door, just the way she had when Lila had been a child. She wants her to come and pick her up into her arms, and wind Lila’s thin little legs around her waist and carry her away, cooing.</p><p><em> But she’s not coming. She’s never coming. She’s… </em> Lila stares at her crimson boots, still neatly lined up by the door. <em> She’s not any different from them, is she? So much of me is just what I’d taken from her. I can’t help it, can I? There’s nothing that’s mine, so I just keep grabbing to the first person closest to me and making myself in their image.  </em></p><p>This in itself is not unusual. All people have a good sum of their being composed from the pieces of the people they love, or loved, or could have loved, or might love yet, knitted together by the connective sinew of the person’s own being. </p><p>The thing that makes it wrong, in Lila’s case, is that she had never gotten to truly understand how to piece them together in a shape that pleased her, a shape that she herself fit into, a shape that becomes her. They’re all in her, all coalescing and terribly tangled, and she cannot extract them from one another, cannot pull herself out from the middle of it all, cannot even tell where she ends and they begin. </p><p>
  <em> And now that I’m alone, I can’t pretend otherwise. </em>
</p><p>There’s so <em> little </em>of her, and Lila doesn’t want to be alone. She doesn’t. She really doesn’t. She just wants to know that she’ll still get to be herself, and the only way she’ll ever get to do that is if she isn’t around someone else, that she won’t be beholden to their thoughts, and their feelings, and their demands, and their powers, and...</p><p>Perhaps she’s wrong. Perhaps these powers still are <em> here, </em> trapped inside of her somewhere. Perhaps she can draw them out, can claim them for herself. Perhaps she doesn’t have to be caught on a string, jerked this way and that by the Hargreeves siblings. Perhaps she can make it hers somehow, perhaps she can cut those strings.</p><p>But she’s swelling, engorged on all of these other people, and her head’s going to explode, and her skin will split open and she feels like she’s going to die here, and nobody will even notice. Nobody will notice at all, and she can’t stop it, because she doesn’t understand how this power of hers works…</p><p>But, she realizes. There’s someone who <em> does. </em> There’s someone who knows exactly how to help her, who’s spent a lifetime studying all these powers that are plaguing her, who’s alone and adrift as she, and who would not turn her away. Ronnie and Anita and Mother are dead, and one half of this family that she’s been absorbed into is slain by her hand, and the other half is in the wind, but she is not alone yet.</p><p>The extraordinary internal compass within her is broken, and the needle is spinning and spinning and spinning. She is lost, she has lost herself, and all these people have consumed her. </p><p>She needs help, and she cannot do this alone. Alone she is lost, alone she is ordinary, alone, she has no purpose at all. </p><p>She needs help, and there’s only one person she knows can give it to her.</p><p>Lila peels her cheek off the cold tile floor where she’s been laying for hours. She tugs the jet-black sleeves of her turtleneck down, over her arms, to cover the angry red scratch marks. She gets up, swaying slightly, feeling her knees ache as if she were fifty-eight years old, instead of twenty-seven. She steps around the glass on the floor, and tugs on her cherry-red boots. She pulls the coral-orange leather jacket over her shoulders, and examines her tired, bleary face in the little mirror by the door. Her eyes aren’t smeared with dark makeup any longer, and the auburn ends of her stringy hair have faded to a dull orange. She looks like she’s dead.</p><p>Lila pockets just enough cash from the apartment to be able to buy herself a plane ticket, and leaves. </p><p>All alone, Lila is ordinary, and she cannot flash across an ocean in an instant, cannot lift herself off the ground and float across the sea. She has to sit in a cramped seat in economy, and stare out the little porthole, with her hand clawing at her roiling gut. </p><p>Dark, smoke-colored clouds hang over the sky, when they land, and Lila can feel the humid chill just before a lightning storm as she makes the long, foot-numbing trek to her destination, can smell the brackish breeze rolling in from across the lake. </p><p>The clouds are parturient, and their water breaks when Lila lays eyes on her destination. When she stands in front of it, she is gathering rainwater in the soles of her boots, feeling her socks cling slimily to her scraped feet. In the state that she’s in, she probably looks like a soaked cat. She would be annoyed by the way her turtleneck is clinging to her chest and shoulders, by the way her hair is hanging in wet ropes around her head, but she's so tired, and she wants all of this to be over. She wants to be free of it, and she might get sneered at, but she honestly couldn't care less. </p><p>It’s been months since she’s been here, and it’d been an absolute mess when she’d left it, all trampled through by a panicked stampede, with shattered stone everywhere. It's been spiffed up since then, and looks more like she’d first seen it, standing tall and full of its own grandeur, leering down at her with window-eyes that now look hungry for her.</p><p>Lila reaches up, and knocks on the mahogany door for five full minutes, feeling her bruised and battered knuckles pulse in pain, but refusing to stop for even a moment. She has to make herself known, and the house is enormous. It will take time for someone to hear her, to make the journey down through the maze of halls to reach her.</p><p>Then, a shadow passes over the smoky glass, the door opens, and Lila is faced with the person she had come here for, who looks at her with absolute surprise. Of course he’d be surprised; he’s never met her in person, though he’s been made aware of her some time ago, and he’s expecting someone very different to come calling.</p><p>“I need your help,” Lila says, and in return, she offers him everything.</p><p>Sir Reginald Hargreeves merely stares at her, swelling with terrible, delusional hope. Suddenly, his mission has not ended in failure; it has not ended at all. The ever-doomed world might yet be saved, and he might be the one to do it. The last of his wayward children has finally come home, and Sir Reginald determines that has never truly required the power of six or seven or thirteen or forty-six children, when all he had ever needed was one, with the power of all. And here she is on his doorstep, reaching out to him with open arms. He looks at her, hungry for all the possibility she provides, and decides that she will do nicely. With some improvements.</p><p>He opens the door, and steps aside. The house opens its maw to Lila.</p><p>Because it is better than being alone, she feeds herself to it willingly. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I feel like the second chapter of this fic is sincerely one of the best I've written in this series, so I suppose it follows that this one be a little lacking. I don't particularly mind much though. We're here, right up at the very end, and all that's left is the climax. </p><p>Thanks to everyone who read!</p><p>______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________</p><p>Coming up next: the end of something.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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